bugs when you lift up a rock

izzy's playlists!
sheepfilms
cherry valley forever
Three Goblin Art
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Stranger Things

pixel skylines

JVL

#extradirty
Claire Keane
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Not today Justin
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

Andulka

ellievsbear

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
we're not kids anymore.
will byers stan first human second

tannertan36
i don't do bad sauce passes

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@i-eated-a-rock
bugs when you lift up a rock
Good Bones, by Maggie Smith / Witch Hat Atelier, by Kamome Shirahama
made some great friends today
Olruggio was having a normal day three hours ago. He was coming home after a long day at work looking forward to seeing his husband best friend and eating a warm dinner. Pat the kids on the head and then go lie down. NO Qifrey says I have obtained another child she's a part of an active criminal investigation and a sign that I am dipping back into my worst destructive behaviors that you thought I'd set down years ago you have to be okay with this right now or else I'll lobotomize myself. Also there's a rat in the living room.
Qifrey and his qiflings (I love them)
great trope
The reading comprehension and overall common sense on this website is piss poor.
how dare you say we piss on the poor
World Heritage Post
I love this post especially the rat part
going on me feed
what do you mean there are exactly zero rats i. this post
mr sandman
man me a sand
Make it the cutest man car door hook hand
i cannot begin to explain the emotions i feel every day knowing that this post i made in the middle of playing tf2 when i was 16 is going to be the one thing of mine that has made the largest impact on the world by a fucking mile
@hellsite-hall-of-fame
dentists have started recommending me invisalign and I don't know how to break it to them that I can't do that because I will just chew on the plastic retainers
One time someone referred to me as "unproblematic" irl and I was struck with the conflicting feelings of "how much of myself have I been unknowingly putting into people-pleasing??" and "oh my god I did it. I fucking won people-pleasing" and they rebounded off each other and I just said "thanks?"
truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.
whatever
i’m going to fucking crash out
I think this interaction shines light on a problem with regards to invasive species that I've noticed, which is that as science communicators are raising awareness of invasive species, there hasn't been an equally adequate effort in helping people learn how to correctly identify invasive species or even to understand precisely why they are a concern in the first place.
The best example for the first part of the problem I can think of right now is that "murder hornet" trend that engulfed the US back in 2020-2021. That wasn't just an online phenomenon. Academic institutions in real life had received a large amount of reports, calls, and identification requests. And of those thousands of reports, all of them turned out to be false IDs, not a single positive ID of Vespa mandarinia [1]. Furthermore, despite the last positive ID in the United States being from 2021, and WSDA declaring V. mandarinia eradicated from North America, I still see people on this very website talking about trapping and killing "Asian giant hornets" as recently as a few months ago (they were all false IDs).
For the second part, there is a sentiment in the current zeitgeist that doesn't perceive invasive animals as a disrupting element in a niche they don't belong, but as a specific group of animals that are somehow inherently malicious and destructive. This sentiment treats invasive animals as "evil things that came from who-knows-where" instead of delving deeper into the real "why" of it, which is most often of anthropogenic nature, such as global shipping, pet trade, state-sponsored introduction, etc. This line of thinking can and has led people to develop a blind spot for the fact that invasive species (even correctly identified ones) are typically not invasive everywhere; they too have native niches they belong to. For example, many of the most well-known invasive insects in the United States like Asian longhorned beetles, spotted lanternflies, and the aforementioned Vespa mandarinia are actually native to where I live, in Northeastern China, and serve important roles in our ecosystem. They are only a ecological concern when they become "bugs-out-of-place", so to speak.
All this to say, invasive animals are a problem because they are, typically via human activities, introduced into a new environment where have little to no predator/competition and thus could disturb the intricate ecological balance, and not because an insect has somehow become enamored with the idea of classical conquest. Also, that wasp you saw flying by was probably at least 130% smaller than you thought. That's okay. I make the same mistake sometimes.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/ae/article/68/2/38/6605208
respect all hymenopterans (and other unliked arthropods)
I could be a tRNA
I could do this
I could be a tRNA
When you ID a bird in front of someone and they ask you how you could tell and you honestly can't think of anything to say other than "by looking at it"