Kaleigh, by the way.

[the-prophesied-disco-gay]

A friend stopped by

[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

[plaguedocboi]

Yeah that’s also something we’re worried about now! Obviously increased CO2 levels in the ocean are well known to cause acidity issues that can literally dissolve some animal’s shells, but this was one of the first times it’s been observed to directly impact lobster hatching rates. I’m pretty sure my boss is or was writing a paper on it because this could be a big problem in the future if they’re really this sensitive to CO2.

Hopefully the levels of CO2 out in the ocean won’t get as high as a contained indoor tank in a crowded building would, but it’s certainly something scientists should be aware of going forward and we’re trying to get the word out!

[frankhermann]

actually annoyed by long distance friends again. i want to go for a walk i want to get drinks i want to sit in the grass and write i want to go to the fucking store together

[vanessagillings]

Oh, to be a tiny mermaid to escape the heat

[havingapoemwithyou]

Love Letter from the Afterlife by Andrea Gibson

[isthatatiktok]

[handweavers]

[gunsandfireandshit]

[ahedderick]

This is the most beautiful scientific diagram I've ever seen.

Also a great example of why pink is a tint of red, but also a completely different color. Erbium? Neodymium? So beautiful.

[ms-demeanor]

FYI Neodymium glass (aka Alexandrite glass to collectors) appears different colors under different lights:

This image is from a great writeup of why that happens on the Jennii Neutron blog.

[ms-demeanor]

Oh and of course Uranium, Selenium, Manganese, and Cadmium all fluoresce under black light.

[hiveswap]

Everyone go look up the song nasa banned from space

[hiveswap]

Don't forget to play it loud as fuck

[kowai-kabuki-tanuki]

please….listen to the whole thing. And imagine that you are IN SPACE in 1973 and you JUST woke up. Every time you adjust…it escalates somehow.

This song had to be designed in a lab for the sole purpose of fucking with astronauts. whoever added it to the NASA playlist was a genius.

[hiveswap]

It took them two tries to ban it?

[kvotheunkvothe]

[taguroc]

Generally speaking, would your OC be considered conventionally attractive by the standards of the society they live in?

[snowkissedmonsters]

the moment art is made public it belongs to the audience, its meaning will always be fluid as each individual viewer finds new ideas in the work that emerge from their unique experience of our world. In this way, no interpretation can be correct or incorrect; no one can say what the art is "about"-

*sees one of the strangest and deeply selective interpretations of Spirit: Stallion of The Cimarron*

okay well its maybe not about that

[hope-for-the-planet]

We look at how conservation efforts in India have been pivotal to the survival of these birds.

In the early 2000s, vulture populations in Asia began to crash for no apparent reason. It was eventually discovered that a drug veterinarians used to treat cattle was highly toxic to vultures and poisoning them when they fed on cattle carcasses. The governments of India, Pakistan, and Nepal all worked to ban the toxic drug and support vulture conservation programs.

Twenty years later this is a huge conservation success story. Several Asian vulture populations that had decreased by over 99% before the ban have made huge recoveries thanks to conservation breeding centers, the creation of vulture safe zones, and stricter drug regulations.

[ranrandraws]

Come into the water

Do you wanna be my baby?

Are you waiting to touch me?

[ranni-thewitch]

thou hast tee'd thy last hee

[covid-safer-hotties]

Source

[rikaklassen]

Image description: Icons of two human heads wearing white respirator masks facing each other. Between the heads at eye line is a dotted line with the text "See a mask?" between the masks is a dotted line with the text "Wear a mask" At the bottom of the image reads: "Mask mirroring is patient-centered care." Description taken from the alt text in the source.

[spiribia]

Why is so much adult oriented 2d animation bastard ugly, do they know they don’t have to do that? The characters don’t have to projectile vomit all the time either, but maybe that’s asking too much

[captain-price-returns]

[darlingofdots]

been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call "is this book afraid of me?" and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don't come after the writer on twitter

[playwrongs]

Tags via @deadpanwalking, editor and ass-kicker extraordinaire

[gingisnap]

Please keep making art. Please make it for yourself. Please don’t let everything become even more of the same flat general appeal nonsense that doesn’t seem to have anything to say