@randomsolarpunkramblings - Tumblr Blog

Hexagonal growth in a black olive tree

Let's play: Is it AI or Real?

Red flags: Unbelievable nature you've never seen before!, no external source cited, low image quality could be hiding AI artifacts, lacks scientific name for plant, OP is an aesthetic blog (no offense, I see you credit most of the artists you post, OP <3).

Green flags: Common name of the tree provided (although the leaves don't look like any olive tree I've ever seen).

Reverse image searches and citation trails all seem to lead back to now-deleted Reddit posts. Google Images says it's this one in r/NatureIsFuckingLit, and TinEye says it's this one in r/interestingasfuck. Both were posted back in 2020. This is important because the rise of AI images was in 2022.

People in the comments of places this image is posted throw around botanical terms like "dichotomous branching" [branches split into two at the nodes] and "divaricated" [branches grow far apart from each other], which are cool, but don't tell me what the tree is.

Searching up "Black Olive" on iNaturalist finally got me some answers, and it turns out that YES. This is a real tree! This tree is a Dwarf Black Olive (Terminalia molinetii, Formerly Bucida spinosa). The above photos are some particularly nicely framed shots of a tree with particularly small leaves, which really highlights the branching structure. I really wish we knew the photographer's name. Here are some more photos of the same species:

Terminalia molinetii by jriveracruz50 on iNaturalist, posted under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

This tree is native to Southern Mexico, Belize, the southern tip of Florida, and Cuba. Dwarf Black Olives are completely unrelated to Olive trees in the Olea genus that I'm more familiar with (the former is in Order Myrtales [Myrtles, Evening Primroses, and Allies], and the latter is in Order Lamiales [Mints, Plantains, Olives, and Allies]).

Stay critical, and –more importantly– curious, y'all! The world is a beautiful place, we don't need fictional plants passed off as real ones for that to be true.

durnesque-esque

Posting this because apparently some of you really need to internalize that you do not have to be a perfect person to deserve justice.

boycritter

maybe i like my tech a little bit inconvenient

boycritter

maybe i like pulling out my debit card instead of using apple pay. maybe i like untangling my wired headphones. maybe i like typing something into the search bar instead of using siri or whatever. maybe i like curating my own social media feeds over an algorithm. i just don’t think everything has to be perfectly streamlined and efficient i like it when things feel tethered to the real world.

elbiotipo

why bother caring about the environment when 1. It’s so obviously a lost cause and 2. There’s definitely going to be a nuclear war?

And what are you doing about it Anon? Learn about ecological restoration or get out of my way.

elbiotipo

If you read ecology books printed in the 70s and 80s, they were absolutely convinced that whales and tigers would not survive the century. There's a whole plot in Star Trek about how whales are extinct actually. Here in Argentina, we were sure that yaguaretés would have gone extinct. It was thought that rainforests would be forever lost, because there was no way that such complex ecosystems would be restored.

Now, you can go to Península Valdés and find that the whale population there is growing year after year, people can see them from their windows. In Iberá, where yaguaretés were extinct for over 70 years, there's now a population of 35 and growing, after being reintroduced just five years ago. As for rainforests?

We've becoming very, very good on restoring them. Natural environments, when given space and time to heal, can return to that they were. And after all, all natural enviroments are managed by human societies. It is up to us to implement a good management, un buen gobierno.

I firmly believe our children and grandchildren will see a restoration of Earth like never before.

Millions of people are working on this. You can learn about it, perhaps even become one of them. Or be a pointless doomer in my ask box. Your choice.

elbiotipo

thememedaddy

silvermoon424

Nazis crashing the fuck out at Elmo for no reason is one of my new favorite genres. Literally this pic:

EDIT: It turns out the Jordan Peterson ones are fake (they're real tweets but not directed at Elmo). However, Peterson DOES hate Elmo and has @'d him before.

thememedaddy

ethan---ng

Dreams dir. Akira Kurosawa (1990)

fireheartedpup

depsidase

aralintheobsessive

if you want butterflies, you need to live with caterpillars.

i am not being metaphorical, i work in a garden center, stop buying plants 'to bring in the bees and butterflies' and then immediately poisoning every caterpillar that dares to consume a single leaf

you will not get butterflies if you kill all the things that turn into butterflies! what are you doing!

bisforbutch

As a poet, I also want my viewers to take this rather beautiful allegory into account.

depsidase

bread-and-roses-too

Not feminist as in "women should be included in the draft" but feminist as in "being drafted is a violation of bodily autonomy for any gender".

The draft should not exist. Drafting people into the military is a violation of human rights. You should not be able to force someone to risk their life. If you can't find enough people who care about a conflict to keep it going then it simply shouldn't keep going. You can't even force someone to donate a kidney using government power, why the fuck can you force them to donate their whole body and life to a cause they don't agree with or don't care about?