i cannot rest until i find out what a fish is

Evan | 29 | this blog is about close up pictures of tiny flowers, among other things. mostly other things. but the tiny flowers are always in my heart.

[contemptible-scoundrel]

if you're pure of heart you will never be injured in any knife fight

[viralfrog]

[irish-american-chan]

The Summertime Is A Little Different From The Normaltime

[irish-american-chan]

Did You Know Clovers Theyre Doing This Kind Of Thing Nowadays

[abyssaldyke]

It's spring now which means the kids in my city have started drawing hopscotches on the sidewalk and as a rule I do every hopscotch I see because 1. Use it or lose it (ability to scotch) and 2. If a child got down on the hardscrabble streets of Boston Massachusetts to draw a scotch the least I can do is use it, but in doing the hopscotches, I've learned that about 50% of them are the typical 8-10 step scotch and the other 50% are. Somewhat avant-garde. And of course I'm not vetting the entire scotch before I start it so sometimes it's like haha 8 steps woo! Childlike whimsy! And sometimes they're 20 steps or 30 or they've got a section with three squares instead of two where you have to do a little Charleston to step on all three, or, memorably, FORTY one foot squares. A full BLOCK of jumping on one foot but I'm no quitter so once I've started Jigsaw Junior's fuckin hopscotch gauntlet I'm there til the end just a daily pot smoker in her thirties jumping kasa-obake style through an affluent suburb while some little proto-kennedy watches from his bedroom window rubbing his sadistic little third grade hands together and cackling. It's amazing. I love spring.

[swaxe]

Today's LGBTQ+ Character of the day is

The Essential Worker (heavily implied)

[herpsandbirds]

Carpenter Frog (Lithobates virgatipes), family Ranidae, found along the Atlantic Coastal plain, from NJ to GA, in the U.S.

They prefer acidic aquatic environments, with ample sphagnum moss, such as bogs and fens.

The name comes from the frog's call, which resembles a carpenter hammering.

Listen to the call here.

photographs: MH Herpetology & Adrian Bara-Popa

[fishdetective]

crossing her paws

[youcanstillwhistle]

I think the "pre" and "post" parts in "preposterous" should cancel each other out but everyone else seems to find my idea completely erous

[iridescent-wildlife]

Tricolored Heron (Egretta tricolor). Family Ardeidae, order Pelecaniformes.

On the hunt for some fish. I love watching them get all low and slowly stalk through the water.

Galveston, Texas, USA. April 2026.

[herpsandbirds]

Pine Barrens Tree Frog (Dryophytes andersonii), male calling, family Hylidae, southern AL, USA

There are 3 disjunct populations of this frog, named after the NJ Pine Berrens area, in and around NJ, the Carolinas, and SO AL.

The strange distribution is most likely due to severe habitat loss.

Hear the call here.

photographs by Seth Patterson

[jenny-holzer]

[humanbyweight]

do you think cicadas and wasps could be friends

Most animals have a fundamentally different experience of the world than we do, so the possibility of friendship between insects is a difficult thing to judge.

I think we can safely rule out friendship between cicadas and all the species of wasps that want to eat them. That still leaves tens of thousands of species of wasps that have no direct ecological relationship with cicadas, in what we will call the "kind of maybe plausible friendship zone". I think their friendship might go something like this:

wasp: *cleans wing with foot* cicada: wasp: *sniffs air with antenna* cicada: wasp: cicada: Å̷͉̕Å̷̳͝A̷̫̭̒Ả̷̢̺̓A̵̢͒̏A̴̛̬̿Ä̴̯A̵̰̓̆A̷͈̔ͅÄ̵̡́ͅA̷̟̬̓A̷̭̓Å̸͔ͅA̷̘̰͐A̶̦͝Ȁ̸̦̝A̸̻͆A̷̬̽͊A̸̠͊A̴̮̎A̷̗̬͒̋Ǎ̴̰̳Ǎ̶̛͇A̷̩̣͗͌A̴̮͘ͅÃ̴ͅÀ̵̫ wasp: big shake :0 !!! cicada: wasp: *checks underside of leaf for aphids* cicada: *falls off leaf*

[norwegianfacecrusher]

Behold my Hercules beetle! I took a huge chunk of time away from piecing and sewing in general due to work insanity, but I finally got around to finishing this boy.

The fabric is all second hand: the background fabric came from a local craft thrift store, and the green/orange and brown/gold speckled fabrics are twice reused kimono silks. The kimono fabric was gifted to me by the wonderful Madame Button, who used the original garments to make these gorgeous corsets.

She got the kimono because they were either new dead stock, or in such bad condition that they couldn't be worn. She can't use the fabric once it's cut up smaller than a corset panel, so she's been chucking the scraps at me for a while, and I've finally gotten over my fear of cutting up such beautiful silks. Go check out The Bad Button on Instagram and Facebook and drool over her other gorgeous pieces.

I decided to forgo sandwiching and quilting this because I wanted the piecing lines to be the highlight. For now it's tacked to a plain cotton bed sheet until I can find a nicer frame for it.

Pattern is from Etive & Co on Etsy and I could not recommend their patterns enough. I scaled the pattern up by 200% because I wanted the silks to really shine in this design.

[fishdetective]

I've walked through so much long grass this year and have not found a single tick on me which is making me more nervous than if I had been finding ticks. where are they

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

[wire-smith]

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

[markovchaingang]

new report finds that over 30% of uranium in nuclear power plants is lost via engineers having a little bite when they think nobody's watching

[fishdetective]

tree froggin'