Botany Bay

🌵Plants and Outlaws.🌵 This is a side blog dedicated to plants, gardening, botanical science, plantsonas, and plant art etc... All are welcome. No terfs, no turfs.

[pocketsizedquasar]

“don’t ever be surprised to see a rose shoulder up among the ruins of the house: this is how we survived.” - “a rose shoulders up” by Mosab Abu Toha

a painting referenced from this photo of Mohammad Abu Thabet and his children picking anenome flowers, photographed by Abed Omar Qusini in 2016.

in honor of today’s global strike for a free palestine ! @fairuzfan suggested making art for the strike so i rushed to finish this for today 🇵🇸🇵🇸 from the river to the sea. there is palestinian joy in the future

[ID: A digital painting of a Palestinian man, Mohammad Abu Thabet, and his children picking red flowers in a field. Mohammad is kneeling in the flower field holding up a bouquet of the flowers and smiling warmly at them.]

[hope-for-the-planet]

First-of-its-kind study definitively shows that conservation actions are effective at halting and reversing biodiversity loss

A new study published online today, April 25, in the scientific journal Science provides the strongest evidence to date that not only is nat

From the article:

“If you look only at the trend of species declines, it would be easy to think that we’re failing to protect biodiversity, but you would not be looking at the full picture,” said Penny Langhammer, lead author of the study and Executive Vice President of Re:wild. “What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. It is clear that conservation must be prioritized and receive significant additional resources and political support globally, while we simultaneously address the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable consumption and production.”

This massive meta analysis (for those not familiar, a study analyzing the results of many studies on similar topics) found that the vast majority of conservation efforts show much much better results than doing nothing. In many cases, biodiversity loss was not only stopped but reversed.

This shows that conservation efforts really work and money invested is put to very good use. Legally protecting endangered species really works, restoring habitat really works, removing invasive species really works, returning land to Indigenous communities works. All of the blood, sweat, and tears being poured into protecting the natural world has been making a real, big, tangible, difference on a global scale.

[herpsandbirds]

Beetle Fly (Celyphus sp.), family Celyphidae, Malaysia

Yes, this is actually a true fly! (order Diptera)

photographs by Jack K H Loo

[wolveswolves]

Unique footage! This pack of 11 wolves appeared in front of a wildlife camera in the Southwest Veluwe in the Netherlands last week. These recordings are made with fixed cameras that are triggered by movement.

🎥 Natuurmonumenten forest ranger Frank Theunissen

[sivavakkiyar]

John Cage, A Year From Monday

[petrichordiam]

[image ID: (photocopied image of black text on eggshell white paper) - Once when I was in Ann Arbor with Alexander Smith, I said that one of the things I liked about botany was that it was free of the jealousies and selfish feelings that plague the arts, that I would for that reason, if no other, given my life to live over again, be a botanist rather than a musician. He said, "That shows how little you know about botany." Later in the conversation I happened to mention the name of a mycologist connected with another Midwestern university. Incisively, Smith said, "Don't mention that man's name in my house."]

[chillyfeetsteak]

listen to jane

[jadafitch]

Day 27 of Avian August 2025, Birds of Hawaii, hosted by @cookiedoves: ʻŌʻū (Psittirostra psittacea)

The last time anyone reported seeing an ʻōʻū was in 1989, and in 2024, this species of Hawaiian honeycreeper was declared extinct. Before its sudden decline in the 20th century, the bird was fairly widespread across the islands, flying long distances in search of fruit. Its preferred food was the fruit of the ʻieʻie (Freycinetia arborea). In return for this nourishment, the ʻōʻū helped disperse the seeds of the vine-like epiphytic plant across the islands.

[atan-orofarne]

It's a bit early for bugling, but he was bugling nonetheless.

(Up in RMNP with my parents this past weekend.)

[smbc-comics]

I read that it's sometimes called Italian Man Orchid, which is an insult or compliment, depending on whether you're talking absolute size or size relative to the rest of the petal.

Check out the bonus panel on the site!

SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ BLUESKY ◆ STORE

Buy this comic as a print!

[turtlesandfrogs]

What I was taught growing up: Wild edible plants and animals were just so naturally abundant that the indigenous people of my area, namely western Washington state, didn't have to develop agriculture and could just easily forage/hunt for all their needs.

The first pebble in what would become a landslide: Native peoples practiced intentional fire, which kept the trees from growing over the camas praire.

The next: PNW native peoples intentionally planted and cultivated forest gardens, and we can still see the increase in biodiversity where these gardens were today.

The next: We have an oak prairie savanna ecosystem that was intentionally maintained via intentional fire (which they were banned from doing for like, 100 years and we're just now starting to do again), and this ecosystem is disappearing as Douglas firs spread, invasive species take over, and land is turned into European-style agricultural systems.

The Land Slide: Actually, the native peoples had a complex agricultural and food processing system that allowed them to meet all their needs throughout the year, including storing food for the long, wet, dark winter. They collected a wide variety of plant foods (along with the salmon, deer, and other animals they hunted), from seaweeds to roots to berries, and they also managed these food systems via not only burning, but pruning, weeding, planting, digging/tilling, selectively harvesting root crops so that smaller ones were left behind to grow and the biggest were left to reseed, and careful harvesting at particular times for each species that both ensured their perennial (!) crops would continue thriving and that harvest occurred at the best time for the best quality food. American settlers were willfully ignorant of the complex agricultural system, because being thus allowed them to claim the land wasn't being used. Native peoples were actively managing the ecosystem to produce their food, in a sustainable manner that increased biodiversity, thus benefiting not only themselves but other species as well.

So that's cool. If you want to read more, I suggest "Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America" by Nancy J. Turner

[turtlesandfrogs]

And then I think about:

How we hunted the beavers to near extinction, and a beaver pond effects the soil moisture level, wetlands, etc.

How we banned intentional fires, and now are dealing with bigger, hotter, more dangerous fires. And that one of the tools in invasive species management is intentional fires.

How we have all these invasive plant species invading everywhere, and if people were still allowed/encouraged to "forage" like they did pre-colonialization, that would include removing those invasive species. And people would have eyes everywhere, so the populations of invasive species would not have had the chance to get established.

The land needs people. Leaving it "wild" and "untouched" is actually neglect.

[sleepy-sluggo]

Avian august day 3: Hawai’i ‘akepa ! Reusing this from a avian august 2023 lol

Prints and stickers available on my redbubble!

[birdslop]

baby goldfinch worht its weight in gold?

[vangoghcore]

by jonathan.mllr

[mundanesalad]

it came to me in a vision

[bug-lovers-island]

Been thinking about hot rod horseshoe crab all day

[godmybackhurts]

@plaguedocboi hot rod horseshoe crab

[elodieunderglass]

Thank you @artisannerd it’s fantastic!

[botaniqueer]

When u are a fruit posting fruit

Feat: the world’s most pathetic ear of corn! Tbh I wasn’t expecting anything at all since you need dense blocks to get the wind pollination to work consistently and corn isn’t a super high yielding crop anyways. (Apparently one or two good ears a plant is typical)

I am sad that I wasn’t able to infect them with the fungus successfully :P

[spookymoosestudio]

"King of the Creek" - by Me

This one is the concept illustration for the mural I made in my hometown <3 I Finally have prints available of this beauty in my shop if you are interested: https://www.etsy.com/shop/SpookyMooseStudio

Also, here is what the mural ended up looking like:

[mushbeast]

happy pride month to my fellow queer birders 🦄

[birds-in-posts]

Black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus)