Grasslands

Just your regular dyed-hair disabled queer trying to make something out of this life 🏳️‍🌈♿

[mossy-suggestions]

may your soul be overgrown with moss. may your veins fill with rainwater and your lungs swell with flowers.

[princeofthegrasslands]

Overgrown

[anarchistmemedistro]

[princeofthegrasslands]

I hate hate hate hate everything about those summaries with all my being.

And it's EVERYWHERE!

Documents, books, websites, even emails have AI summaries to it! And its so generic and brushed over, it barely says anything about the content at all!

And the worst is, that this is just a strategy to grab all that juicy data inside docs and emails, cause you have to allow AI to read through all your stuff in order to summarize it, and the illiteracy is a collateral effect. Big Corp doesn't even care enough to create illiteracy as the main goal, it's just a good coincidence for them. They only want data, cause data is knowledge, and they know how powerful knowledge is. They got the best combo possible, in which everyone voluntarily gives them their data and slowly loses critical thinking. Win win for Big Corp again!

[dailyaquaticinvert]

diatoms from my header. various species

[princeofthegrasslands]

What a beautiful pattern on this tiny leaf, i could've spent hours starting at it. Picture doesn't do it justice, to be honest.

[cuunos]

jellyfish lifecycles piss me off a little bit

[cuunos]

you don't have to do that. you can just not do that

[eddieintheocean]

:D they can do more :D (x)

[princeofthegrasslands]

:) they can do even more :)

That chart only shows the variety of life cycles among the ones we call jellyfish :) there is so much more the other cnidarians can do :)

Anemones: mostly sessile, some can detach and swim away by wiggling their bodies like worms by brief periods, and then retach. They have roughly 4 options of life cycles, with a lot of variation among the species.

Coral: oh boy these are fun! They have 3 to 4 different paths with a lot of variation among the species. They are sessile colonies, that somehow developed something in the likes of an endoskeleton, and they are simbionts to zooxantelas, which allows them a life quite close to photosynthetic organisms.

And don't get me started on Man'o wars! These things? A colony. Not one organism, many organisms wildly different from one another, attached in a simbiotic way, and not sessile! You know how weird it is for a colony to not be sessile? And you know how weird it is for a colony to have organisms this different from one another? Yeah, man'o wars are weird. And in that weirdness, they also have one of the strongest toxins among the cnidarians. And that life cycle? Wild.

I could keep talking about the less well known cnidarians as well, and even discuss the deep sea weirdos, but i think all this is enough to show that...

Cnidarians can do so, so much more :)

I love them :)

[princeofthegrasslands]

Besties

Those 3 friends weren't together like this, i collected each one from a different sample so i could take a picture of the 3 species of the same genus that occur here at the bay next to each other, for comparison.

It's not easy to collect nanometric little dudes from one sample and transfer them to a different dish, but it sure as hell is fun.

[princeofthegrasslands]

Ah yeah i forgot to say, they are from the genus Tripos, that was previously Neoceratium (changed circa 2013), a group of marine dinoflagellates that was relatively recently separated from the Ceratium genus (division occurred circa 2010). Ceratium now only contains their freshwater cousins.

Bigger one is Tripos gravidus, tubular one is T. praelongus and the more alien-ish is the T. cephalotus.

I've seen many revisions that put T. praelongus as just a var. from T. gravidus, and many others that separate them in two species. Back when i was studying them, i based my research on the studies that consider them as two species of the same genus.

I haven't checked the news related to their taxonomy to see if it was decided for good how to classify those three cuties, but i know they already made a lot of scientists suffer and go back and forth on where to put these guys and their other cousins.

Which amuses me a lot and makes the Tripos (previously Neoceratium, previously Ceratium) my favorite genus of dinoflagellates. Tbh, i would go as far as to say they are my favorite marine phytoplankton, including diatoms and all the other tiny things.

[princeofthegrasslands]

Besties

Those 3 friends weren't together like this, i collected each one from a different sample so i could take a picture of the 3 species of the same genus that occur here at the bay next to each other, for comparison.

It's not easy to collect nanometric little dudes from one sample and transfer them to a different dish, but it sure as hell is fun.

[princeofthegrasslands]

Look, i uh...

I might've squished this one a little too much on the dish

But! It still looks cool, right? Right?

[princeofthegrasslands]

I've never seen so many scientific illustrations in the same place before.

Brasil has some of the coolest museums and no one can convince me otherwise.

[princeofthegrasslands]

When the earth wants to shine brighter than the moon, and the universe is trapped between concrete walls,

Do wishes upon metal stars still come true?

[princeofthegrasslands]

Thorn heart, thorn soul...

I yearn for a life away from the city, somewhere green and rural where everyone knows each other and life is small and the sky is big and the stars shine at night... A life i once had...

But also wanting to be somewhere safe, away from the church and from those conservative weeds that infest the heart of so many that still live where i grew up, somewhere all my friends are just a bus away...

Half my heart is still tangled on those grape vines that smell of childhood, trying to break free, and the other heart is stuck to the window of the 8th floor, looking at the city lights at night, hoping they were stars...

Never free...

Never full...

Never whole...

[princeofthegrasslands]

May i present to you...

Cloroplasts!

[princeofthegrasslands]

Here, a little rain noise for you.

Please, feel free to sit and enjoy as long as you want

[princeofthegrasslands]

Birb.

[princeofthegrasslands]

Got myself a really cool shell hoard at the beach

[princeofthegrasslands]

Studying a coral skeleton