Four Pages on a Red Balloon

White, nonbinary, late 20's. He/they pronouns. I like fibercrafts and gardening and social justice. Some parts of this blog setup are relics from as much as a decade ago. Just follow for pictures of other people's dogs, or something.

[yesterdaysprint]

W.K. Haselden in the Daily Mirror, October 25, 1935

[plaguedocboi]

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Conservation is so fucken sick

[oneheadtoanother]

[bophtelophti]

(In case it's not obvious to everybody, this is an edit; "they pay me in woims" is the punchline from a different Nancy comic. The original punchline to this one is also funny:)

[the-real-seebs]

that makes a lot more sense

but the edit is a solid comic

[ikohiki]

fish

[thejewellerybox]

Gannet Diving necklace by Rie Taniguchi

[bethanythebogwitch]

First day of field season and we catch this awesome spotted gar. Just look at those marking

[taurzza]

yaayy kitty for my friend

[breadandm]

somebody posted this Calvin and Hobbes strip and i cannot overstate just how topical this fuckin thing is

[validblogname]

one fight at a time

[lizardlicks]

Black Hills drilling project canceled after backlash from tribes

A South Dakota mining company has canceled a drilling project in the Black Hills after opposition from Native American tribes and local grou

[wizxrdpendrxgon]

The backlash was a major lawsuit from 9 tribes alongside other lawsuits from advocacy groups like NDN Collective. You can support NDN Collective by donating to them here.

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

When cats walk up to you all "hi can I perhaps interest you in me, kitten boy? I'm literally warm and soft"

[escuerzoresucitado]

[thefragman]

@real-sound-reblogs

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I just pulled an all nighter and I thought I was cognitively fine until I saw this beast and immediately thought "oh my god he's in camo, he looks like camo print army clothes, I can't believe that anture randomly made something like that, that coincidence is fucking crazy"

So yeah I should go to bed

[porcelain-dollbones]

snakes really make you appreciate how gross mammals really are. squamates are very dry and clean

[porcelain-dollbones]

a bird is a kind of reptile that has learned to be yucky.

[digitaldiscipline]

This is the 85 year old creator of Roger Rabbit:

[iww-gnv]

Our Union Hall Needs Help!

Friends, followers, and Fellow Workers, the Gainesville IWW's beloved union hall, the Civic Media Center, is in need. The Civic Media Center of Gainesville, Florida, provides countless vital community resources, such as:

The Stetson Kennedy Library, a reading room and leftist library that is home to 15,000 books, journals, newspapers, and magazines.

The Travis Fristoe Zine Library, largest independent zine collection in the southeastern United States.

A meeting space for countless local activism and social justice groups such as the IWW, Food Not Bombs, and Books to Prisoners.

The Gainesville Free Store, which was founded to help local transgender people access affirming clothing and toiletries as well as other important items. The Free Store has seen so much success that they've expanded to serve the entire Gainesville community.

The Gainesville Free Grocery Store, which offers no-questions-asked food to anyone who walks in.

A cool, dry place to rest, with an open bathroom frequently used by our unhoused neighbors.

A venue for local musicians and poets to perform, including during the renowned music festival FEST.

So, so much more. Losing this community hub would be an absolutely devastating blow to our town and our union. We cannot let it die.

Via the Civic Media Center's own social media:

Dear friends, please us survive the Summer Doldrums by renewing your membership or, if you can, making an extra donation in whatever amount you can spare to help us cover rent, bills, and some extra work on our facilities this summer. Here is the direct link to the membership & donation page on our website: https://www.civicmediacenter.org/get-involved If you have Venmo or PayPal you can also just make a contribution using the handle in the graphic below. Thank you for supporting the CMC!

Please, if you can, help us out with a signal boost or a donation -- we love our union hall, and our community needs it!

[doodlesorganizationland]

The Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe made this card for their citizens to present to ICE.

If you are in a different federally recognized tribe in Washington State:

“I am a member of the (insert tribe here) Tribal Nation, which is Tribal Nation federally recognized by the United States.

This means I am also a United States citizen according to the U.S. Citizenship Act of 1924, 8 USC Section 1401.

Our tribe’s enrollment office number is (insert phone number here).

The Native American Rights Fund will assist me if you attempt to illegally detain me. Contact them at 303-447-8760”

[hyperlexichypatia]

IDK I think if cis men are being told that being fat will lower their testosterone and make them Insufficiently Masculine, and cis women are being told that being fat will raise their testosterone and make them Excessively Masculine, and fat trans people are being denied the right to medically transition if they're fat, and thin trans people are warned against HRT because it will make them fat (and this is said about both testosterone and estrogen HRT), and androgynous-presenting people are told that only thin people count as androgynous...

Then maybe...

Maybe...

Maybe the weight loss industry is just using Gender to enforce fatphobia.

[yffresbeard]

i think it is important to recognize the ways in which your favorite thing sucks. i think it keeps u normal

[rabbithaver]

prev im so sorry to put you on blast like this but please know this had me in hysterics