Sade Olutola
Peter Solarz
titsay
JVL
Cosmic Funnies
$LAYYYTER
#extradirty
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
noise dept.
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
hello vonnie
Kiana Khansmith
Misplaced Lens Cap
tannertan36
shark vs the universe
styofa doing anything
Love Begins
Monterey Bay Aquarium
tumblr dot com
One Nice Bug Per Day
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@ologicalinquiries
imagine you’re looking at rocks at the beach and you get jumped by an octopus
geologist, following the attack:
"and THIS IS WHY i am a GEOLOGIST, not a MARINE BIOLOGIST"
there are many disadvantages to being a marine biologist
Mad scientists are great and I adore the lab aesthetic but where is the love for unhinged field work scientists. You drive down a backroad in the middle of the night and your headlights illuminate someone crouched down in the woods completely covered in mud holding five toads in a net. You’re hiking in the remote mountains and there’s some guy perched on a cliff that should be impossible to get to ranting about rocks, they’re gone when you glance back. You’re hanging out by the river one day and see a fully clothed person walk out of the water like Godzilla and they immediately start recording something on a clipboard while muttering to themselves about salamander populations. Feral Science. Degree in being a cryptid
Teaching 5-year-olds about animal classification, fingernails dug into my palms, jaw clenched, just barely holding back telling them about how fish are fake fish are fake fish are fake
y'all ever reach the end of google
I'm starting to gain insight into why people turn into conspiracy theorists. Some topics are so totally neglected that it looks like they were intentionally and maliciously erased, instead of falling victim to arbitrary lack of interest.
I think it's a vicious cycle; when people don't know something exists, they're not curious about it. Also, people use conceptual categories to think about things, and when a topic falls between or outside of conceptual categories, it can end up totally omitted from our awareness even though it very much exists and is important.
This post is about native bamboo in the United States and the fact that miles-wide tracts of the American Southeast used to be covered in bamboo forests
@icannotgetoverbirds It already is a maddening, bizarre research hole that I have been down for the past few weeks.
Basically, I learned that we have native bamboo, that it once formed an ecosystem called the canebrake that is now critically endangered. The Southeastern USA used to be full of these bamboo thickets that could stretch for miles, but now the bamboo only exists in isolated patches
And THEN.
I realized that there is a little fragment of a canebrake literally in my neighborhood.
HI I AM NOW OBSESSED WITH THIS.
I did not realize the significance until I showed a picture to the ecologist where i work and his reaction was "Whoa! That is BIG."
Apparently extant stands of river cane are mostly just...little sparse thickety patches in forest undergrowth. This patch is about a quarter acre monotypic stand, and about ten years old.
I dive down the Research Hole(tm). Everything new I learn is wilder. Giant river cane mainly reproduces asexually. It only flowers every few decades and the entire clonal colony often dies after it flowers. Seeds often aren't viable.
It's barely been studied enough to determine its ecological significance, but there are five butterfly species and SEVEN moth species dependent on river cane. Many of these should probably be listed as endangered but there's not enough research
There's a species of CRITICALLY ENDANGERED PITCHER PLANT found in canebrakes that only still remains in TWO SPECIFIC COUNTIES IN ALABAMA
Some gardening websites list its height as "over 6 feet" "Over 10 feet" There are living stands that are 30+ feet tall, historical records of it being over 40 feet tall or taller. COLONIAL WRITINGS TALK ABOUT CANES "AS THICK AS A MAN'S THIGH."
The interval between flowering is anyone's guess, and WHY it happens when it does is also anyone's guess. Some say 40-50 years, but there are records of it blooming in as little time as 3-15 years.
It is a miracle plant for filtering pollution. It absorbs 99% of groundwater nitrate contaminants. NINETY NINE PERCENT. It is also so ridiculously useful that it was a staple of Native American material culture everywhere it grew. Baskets! Fishing poles! Beds! Flutes! Mats! Blowguns! Arrows! You name it! You can even eat the young shoots and the seeds.
I took these pictures myself. This stuff in the bottom photo is ten feet tall if it's an inch.
Arundinaria itself is not currently listed as endangered, but I'm growing more and more convinced that it should be. The reports of seeds being usually unviable could suggest very low genetic diversity. You see, it grows in clonal colonies; every cane you see in that photo is probably a clone. The Southern Illinois University research project on it identified 140 individual sites in the surrounding region where it grows.
The question is, are those sites clonal colonies? If so, that's 140 individual PLANTS.
Also, the consistent low estimates of the size Arundinaria gigantea attains (6 feet?? really??) suggests that colonies either aren't living long enough to reach mature size or aren't healthy enough to grow as big as they are supposed to. I doubt we have any clue whatsoever about how its flowers are pollinated. We need to do some research IMMEDIATELY about how much genetic diversity remains in existing populations.
@motherfucking-dragons
it's called the Alabama Canebrake Pitcher Plant and there are, in total, 11 known sites where it still grows.
in general i'm feral over the carnivorous plant variety of the Southeastern USA. we have SO many super-rare carnivorous plants!!!
Protect the wetlands. Protect the canebrakes because the canebrakes protect the wetlands.
Many years ago I did some (non-academic) research on native canes in the USA because I thought I remembered seeing a bamboo-like something in the wild that I'd been told was native, and I thought it might make a nice landscaping accent. But the sources I found said something like "unlike Asian bamboos, the American equivilant barely reaches the height of a man", and I went "nah, that is exactly the wrong height for anything." But if it gets 10 feet and up, I think there are a lot of people who would be VERY happy to use it as a sight barrier in public and private landscaping, and if it means putting in a bit of a wetland/rain garden, all the better. The lack of a good native equivelant to bamboo is something I have heard numerous people bemoan. Obviously it's very important to protect wild sites and expand those, but if it'd be helpful, I bet it wouldn't be hard to convince landscapers to start new patches too.
For instance, a lot of housing developments, malls, etc. seem to set aside a percentage of their land for semi-wild artificial wetlands (drainage maybe?) planted with natives, and then block the messy view with walls of arbovitae or clump bamboo from asia - perhaps it would be a better option there?
Good Lord. Arundinaria isn't just a better option, it's perfect.
I was in the canebrake near my house again this morning, and river cane is extraordinarily good at completely blocking the view of anything beyond it. It is bushier and leafier than Asian bamboos, and birds like to build nests in it. It would make a fantastic privacy barrier.
The cane near my house is around 10-12 feet tall. This species can reach 30 feet or more, but I think it needs ideal conditions or to be part of a large colony with a robust system of rhizomes or something.
It grows slowly compared to Asian bamboos, and seems to need some shade to establish, so it would take time to become a good barrier, but no worse than those stupid arborvitae.
plants like this were often intentionally cultivated in planter boxes as a form of water filtration and civil engineering by a bunch of indigenous nations.
There's a reason why Native Americans cultivated canebrakes.
Well, several reasons. As y'all may know, bamboo is stronger than any wood, and therefore it makes a fantastic building material.
The Cherokee used, and still use, river cane to make fishing poles, fish traps, arrows, frames for structures, musical instruments, mats, pipes, and absolutely gorgeous double-woven baskets that can even hold water.
This stuff is, no joke, a viable alternative to plastic for a lot of things. The seeds and shoots are also edible.
Uh I know this is out of left field but I work in plant cloning - it's a lot easier than you'd think to do for plants and it's honestly a really important conservation tool, and good for making a TON of seedlings in a short amount of time. I can look into this genus for like, cloning viability?
I know about reproducing plants from cuttings, rhizome cuttings have proven doable with this species.
Hi y'all, reblogging the Canebrake Post again. It's been over a year since I fell in love with the coolest plant ever. I'm trying to bring it back but I am very small so if any of y'all have a Canebrake nearby you might wanna talk to the owners and contact some local parks and nature preserves yeah?
thanks so much to Thurston Lacalli from the University of Victoria in Canada for ruining my fucking night!
I’m really into internet discourse but only pointless and stupid internet discourse like how many holes there are in a straw (it’s 2)
This is exactly what I’m talking about.
I’m sorry but mathematically speaking this question has a single objectively correct answer, which is 1 hole. This can be very simply proven; a straw and a torus are homotopic, and a torus has one hole.
i odnt think thats true one of my friends is a taurus and hes fine with gay people
no holes, the hole(s) take up far more space than the physical object, and thus are empty space separate from the straw
Food history has been so sanitized by the demonization of carbs. “Our ancestors only had fruits and veggies they didn’t have all these refined carbs” our ancestors drank beer 25/8 because the water was bad. Our ancestors drizzled honey on shit ever since we knew it existed. We’ve been making bread for our entire recorded history. It’s true that bleached sugars specifically are a new thing but high glycemic carbs are not new at all, we’ve been consuming them for thousands of years
Quick correction bc I see this myth everywhere.
People drank beer & fruit wine 25/8 because it was high in calories and also tasty and pretty cheap/easy to make in bulk.
IT WAS NOT USED TO REPLACE OR SANITIZE WATER! THEIR WATER WAS NOT BAD!
The alcohol content in beer/wine back then was too low to actually sanitize anything effectively, and beer/wine only lasts for 6 months (usually less) even while still sealed in a cask, due to oxidization. Oxidation turns fermented liquids into vinegar. Wine and beer wasn’t meant for long-term storage.
This is great, because vinegar is the great preserver! VINEGAR is what people used to store their foods long-term, along with SALT and DRYING and SMOKING.
“Pickling” can be done with pure vinegar if you don’t have any expensive salt around, and vinegar can be made by fermenting any fruit or grain with wild yeast! If you’re lucky, you can also get wine/beer treats out of it on the way.
Circling back around: beer/wine was NEVER a replacement for water. Humans have been drinking from ground springs, wells, rainwater, and clear running water since our ape ancestors got the instinct to avoid stagnant pools.
If you didn’t have immediate access to a source of clean water, you didn’t fucking build a town there!
That’s a big reason why, WORLDWIDE, settlements are ALL historically clustered around sources of water like springs, wells, and rivers. (Or utilized rainwater catchment & storage) And why “the town well is poisoned/dried up!” Is a huge and terrible thing that comes up in a ton of old stories. Losing your source of freshwater means everyone has to move somewhere else, or die.
Even in huge cities, you’d be surprised at how sophisticated freshwater delivery systems were in the middle-ages. London had the “great conduit.” - a man-made, underground channel that moved water directly from a freshwater spring to fill a water tank in the Cheapside marketplace, accessible to the public. This conduit was built in 1245.
Mesopotamians in the BRONZE AGE built clay pipes for sewage removal, and other pipes for rain water collection, and wells. In 4,000 BC.
Building Aqueducts to move spring water into towns was first attributed to the Minoans, who lived in 2,000 BC.
Sanskrit texts from 2,000 BC also detail how to purify water you’re not sure about: expose it to Sunlight, filter it through Charcoal, dip a piece of copper in it at least 7 times, and filter it again. (UV treatment kills bacteria, Charcoal catches many poisons and heavy metal, copper is also antibacterial) <- even if they didn’t know what germs were, prehistoric humans were great at recognizing patterns, and noticing when people DIDNT die.
Persians in 700 BC used ‘qanat’, or tunnels dug into hillsides to let gravity move (CLEAN!) groundwater to nearby towns + for agriculture irrigation. Qanats were still the main water supply for the entire Iranian capitol city until about 1933.
The Roman Empire (312 BC) also built aqueducts to move spring and groundwater across miles and miles.
The Incas (1450) built wondrous examples of hydraulic engineering. Their “stairway of fountains” supplied the entire city of Machu Picchu with fresh spring water from a pair of rain-fed springs atop the mountain. The fountain canals could carry about 80 gallons a minute.
Getting clean drinking water was just not an issue for normal people in MOST long-term settlements. They may not understand germ theory, but they knew clean water was important and would kick up a BIG fuss if those water sources were sabotaged.
In conclusion: people absolutely drank beer and wine with breakfast. They also drank water. It was not a replacement.
Sudden wave of an immense love for humanity has hit me once again…
We all exist together… that’s pretty neat…
Fluorescent mineral display at the 65th Annual Dallas Gem & Mineral Society Show. Long wave ultraviolet on the left, short wave on the right. Pic 1 shows both the long wave and short wave UV lights on. Pic 2 shows just the long wave. Pic 3 shows just the short wave. Pic 4 shows the rocks after all the lights have been turned off. They glow in the dark! Pic 5 shows what they look like under regular, ordinary, boring white light. Pic 6 shows seven rocks that are tenebrescent. Can you find them?
I do wonder how polytheistic religions, before the emergence Monotheism, viewed other polytheistic religions in relation to their cosmology. If a follower of Old Norse religion visited Ancient India and experienced the cultural vastness of Dharmic religions, would they consider their cosmology to be invalid or would they try to fit their cosmology into their worldview.
This is quite interesting, because before the coalescent of second temple Judaism, the ancient Israeli religion was a monolatric one, the belief in the existence of many gods, but with an exclusive worship of a confederate god/pantheon. While the ancient semitic religion of Israel accepted the existence of other gods, the national god of Israel was considered the most superior. In fact, the Bible doesn't explicitly mention the union of God until later, which some scholars theorize is a result from the chronology of the scriptures and the religious belief at that time. Due to the political and social turbulance in ancient Israel at that time, especially with the Babylonian exile, it would mark the end of monolatrism, which transitioned into monotheism.
I bet if a mushroom could lap water out of your hand with a tongue that a gently drinking mushroom tongue on your hand would be the softest and gentlest thing.
jesus christ, i experienced brief but severe grief over not actually being able to experience this.
I think it would feel like a lizard tongue but I've never had a lizard drink out of my hand either, and thus the whole thing remains conceptually elusive.
this put such a vivid image in my head i needed to make it real as soon as i got home
This makes me indescribably overjoyed.
Opened up canvas to see what my geology professor has in store this week and this is on the first page of the module
nothing will ever be funnier to me than the 30-50 feral hogs joke phase, I think about it at least once a week
Happy 30-50 feral hogs day
My dad is a lung surgeon and the way he casually talks about his surgical tools is hilarious. He recently recorded a video to train some new instrumentalists and he was like "okay :) so here's the scalpel, different sized tweezers, the forceps, and the saw I use to crack open people's ribcages :)"
I once watched one of his surgeries in person and when he used the electric scalpel, which cauterises the skin as it's being cut, the smell of burnt flesh obviously started filling the entire OR. And like an absolute sicko, my father said "I could go for a barbecue after this :)"
And he really did take us to a steakhouse after the surgery.
Hey, could you maybe tell us about Labradorite? I checked wiki but I don't understand half the words there. I'm not a giant rock fan, but I like cool rocks and Labradorite looks really cool. Sorry to bother you!
Okay, so, Labradorite. Labradorite is complicated and sciencey, as all good rocks are. I’ll see if I can explain it in a way that makes any sense! (Once again, I’m not a scientist! Correct me if I’m wrong!)
Most minerals, when they’re bright and pretty and colorful, look like that because while they were forming some impurities got mixed into them - usually metals like iron, copper, or titanium. Without any impurities, these rocks would naturally be colorless. We call these guys allochromatic (other-colored).
Other gemstones are certain colors because those elements are an important part of how they formed. They’re not impurities that got mixed in, they’re actually part of the gemstone. Their natural color IS the color you’re seeing. We call them idiochromatic (inherently colored).
But labradorite doesn’t get its color from either of those things. Labradorite is special. It’s part of a third group: psudochromatic (false colored). These rocks aren’t colorful at all, but they LOOK that way when light passes through them.
See, labradorite is actually just… grey. From most angles, it looks like this:
You have to look at labradorite from a pretty specific angle to get those flashy colors, so when we cut it into cabochons for jewelry, or just polish up big pieces of it, we’re careful to do so at the most flattering angle, the angle that shows the most schiller, or “those cool glowy colors.”
Why just the one angle? It’s all about labradorite’s crystal structure, and how it’s formed.
Labradorite is a rock that cooled down really slowly. Because of that, it’s made of lots of very very thin layers of crystal, stacked on top of each other and all pretty much aligned in the same direction. These are alternating layers of albite (mostly sodium), and orthoclase (mostly potassium), which solidify at very slightly different temperatures. Labradorite is a rock that cooled in just the right way for a thin layer of albite to form, then a thin layer of orthoclase, then another thin layer of albite, and so on.
When light hits labradorite at the perfect angle to pass through a bunch of these layers, you get the schiller effect. Basically, a little bit of the light gets bounced off the first layer and back to your eyes. The rest of the light passes through to the second layer, and a little bit gets bounced back to your eyes again, and so on. Every time more light gets sent back to you, it’s a little out of sync, and this makes it look like a different color.
(This is a very simplified way of explaining this.)
If these layers were all perfectly the same size, you’d get a uniform color, like the blue in moonstone. But in labradorite, these layers might be different widths in different places, so different parts of the stone will reflect back wildly different colors! We call this effect labradorescence to differentiate it from the uniform colored adularescence found in moonstone and some opals.
Depending on where it’s found in the world, labradorite can reflect all sorts of different colors!
But whatever color it is, Labradorite will always be the Best and Coolest Rock.
Shiny rock science!
I’ve actually started collecting labradorite specimens.
