Spite And Swordferns

Hallo! You can call me Fuligo. I like fungi and slime molds.

[powerburial]

*covered in mold, fused into the wall, coughing up spores* there is no greater honor than to assist in the proliferation of the mycelium network

[byjove]

doomsday preppers always keeping rusty tins of food in their basement but never building springhouses and smokehouses and paddocks for future livestock 🤨 those canned peaches are only going to bring you so far babe

[byjove]

are you going to study medicinal herbs and their cultivation or are you just going to keep stockpiling weapons like a little bitch 😩

[byjove]

going to shoot your way out of an infected cut, dumbass?

[arsanatomica]

If it’s not prying too much what made you go from working in the gaming industry to wanting to go into anatomy/dissection/vulture culture (I hope I’m using the right terms if not please forgive me!)

1. Have long held childhood interest in animals. Use drawing as coping mechanism for problems at home.  2. Work in the game industry, specialize in creature design. 

3. Start wanting to learn more about animal anatomy so you can design better creatures. 

4. Draw live animals.

4. Draw dead animals so you can examine them more. 

5. Start dissecting dead animals to better understand them

get evicted for dissecting animals at home

6. Seeing the bones will allow me to better understand where muscles attach.  Get good at cleaning bones. 

7. Use dissected animals for reference while designing creatures.  They smell bad. Get good at preserving them.

8. Develop specimen hoarding problem. Start selling boxes of random specimens found around apartment. 

9. Realize that the injuries and marks on the bodies of the animals mean something.

10. Recognize the resilience, courage of the experiences that marked their bodies.

and identify with never having had a voice to speak of what they endured

11. “Someone should know what happened to you.... even if it’s too late, even if it changes nothing, what happened was to you was real.”

12. No one is interested in their stories because the photos are too graphic. Get good at photoshop.

13. Discover that presentation really matters. People are more interested in these stories if they are presented better. Applies this idea to specimens. 

14. Not that interested in creature design for games anymore. Wanders off because other work feels more  meaningful. 

[rritchiearts]

Check this comic and others out on Everyday Feminism!

Transcripts of the comic available at the above link.

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[botanyshitposts]

Can u tell me about moss

(okay so this is gonna be a long post bc i took and then TAed a class partially about mosses so anybody who doesnt want a moss crash course should start scrolling now)

formally mosses are the only things in the taxonomic division Bryophyta. informally you’ll hear people refer to mosses as well as liverworts (Marchantiophyta) and hornworts (Anthocerotophyta) as ‘bryophytes’, because for a long time the three were all lumped into that division together, and people got used to using the term ‘bryophyte’ interchangeably with ‘nonvascular plant’. 

that term, ‘nonvascular’, is the big distinguisher for these three. basically these plants are very, very ancient lineages, as in liverworts are suspected to be the first plants to crawl out of the primordial ooze, and they don’t have proper, distinguishable vascular tissues (xylem and phloem are the main ones in all vascular ‘higher’ plants that forms the other 99% of the plant kingdom). they have primitive vascular tissues, but they’re not hefty enough to do much in terms of moving water through the plant. their ancestors weren’t able to get very far from the shore of the sea/away from a water source, because they needed to stay wet and depended on water for reproduction. while the latter is still true, modern mosses can be very well adapted to dry areas, and some are able to completely desiccate themselves and go dormant for long periods of time before being revived with the next rain. 

out of this triad of Old Lads, mosses and (leafy) liverworts look the most similar and get mixed up the most (there are ‘leafy’ liverworts and ‘thalloid’ liverworts. thalloid liverworts are wack and do not look like mosses at all). the differences between them are incredibly minute, but (leafy!!) liverworts, to be crude about it, are kind of proto-mosses with simpler physiologies. a common signifier is that leafy liverworts almost never have a costa (a single vein running down the middle of each leaf) and instead have completely smooth leaves, whereas costas are common in mosses. other differences are infuriatingly consequential (’oh, but see this liverwort has a costa but it’s still a liverwort, don’t ask questions’) and honestly i have no idea who decided which plants were leafy liverworts and which plants were mosses, but that’s just me.

i should mention also that mosses, like liverworts, are split into two major groups based on their growth forms: ‘acrocarpous’ mosses are mosses who’s stalks stand straight up, and ‘pleurocarpous’ mosses are mosses who’s stalks crawl along the ground. acrocarpous mosses won’t have branching stalks, whereas pleurocarpous mosses can. an example of an acrocarpous moss is on the left, an example of a pleurocarpous moss is on the right:

mosses do not flower. they reproduce by spores. liverworts and hornworts also reproduce by spores, not flowers. it’s easy to forget that ferns, which are like, THE original Old Lads, are actually younger than these lineages and are considered vascular plants for having more advanced xylems and phloems, and flowers didn’t come for several hundred million years after them. mosses reproduce by producing male and female reproductive organs on the parent plant, with sperm and eggs being produced in each, respectively. the sperm can swim, and fertilize the female eggs, which then sprout while still on the plant into stalks (seta) with capsules on the end. these capsules are full of spores, and when the plant is ready the tip falls off and lets the spores catch the breeze, and hopefully a few will find suitable conditions to sprout into new mosses. the entire cycle looks like this:

okay. habitats. mosses live on such a small scale that it’s best to think of how they live in terms of microhabitats instead of habitats, meaning that like, if you look at a forest from the road, that’s one habitat, but the mosses in that forest are experiencing a ton of microhabitats within that habitat. a moss that grows on the side of the tree will dry out really fast after it rains, so a species that might be more susceptible to overwatering may survive better on a tree trunk than at the base of the tree; both places, although at the same physical location, provide way different conditions and will be favored by different species. 

a moss that grows in a crack on the pavement will probably be absolutely swimming in water when it rains, so it’s probably a species that’s either fine with being submerged (and regularly trampled) or otherwise tolerant of it. a moss growing under a decaying log will have more shelter than others, and will have less airflow and higher humidity. if you’re a moss living on the bark on the side of a stump, and that bark rots enough to one day peel away and fall off, that might be absolutely devastating to you despite only losing like one inch of area, but the newly-exposed rotting hardwood creates a new microhabitat that might be favored by other species. it’s one of those things that you really start to notice once you start thinking about it.

now. i want to end this post with the world’s tallest self-supporting moss. my lichen and bryophyte professor has seen this moss in person and has confirmed it is really just Like That. the moss is the acrocarpus Dawsonia superba, and it’s native to Oceana. the tallest ever found was in Borneo, and was a meter tall. here’s a picture of it by gailtv on iNatrualist, observed december 17th, 2015 in New Zealand:

Chonkers™. now, the largest moss that doesn’t support itself is a pleurocarpous moss-vine, Spiridens reinwardtii, also native to Oceania, which crawls up tree trunks and can grow to a length of 3 meters. here’s one spotted by dantn, also on iNaturalist, observed august 23rd 2006 in northern Indonesia (it’s the one that looks like artificial christmas tree branches. that’s one single moss):

end note: i think i’ve recced this book on here before but a really good book to learn more about mosses is Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which is a required book for the course i learned all this in and helped teach later. it’s not a field guide (for that I would recommend finding a moss and liverwort ID guide for your region), but it’s just about mosses in general and essays about how great and wild they are. VERY much worth it

[fishareglorious]

I love this post so much

[undead-puppetry]

[botanyshitposts]

Whats a lichen if not a plant

(Note: writing this response with Capitals™ bc its long and kind of hard to read otherwise, I’m trying to do that more with my longer posts)

Either an ecological event or a superorganism, depending on how you look at it.

To explain this. like. we do not ‘know’ what a lichen is. We know like, what they are, or at least we’re getting increasingly closer to finding out everything that makes up a lichen, but lichenologists have really struggled to define it as like, A Sole Thing. Botanists and mycologists of the past thought lichens were primarily fungi, because when you dried one out and weighed it, most of the dry weight was fungus; this is why today we still name lichens based on their fungal components, while it turns out that the give and take of all organisms in a lichen are pretty much equal.

It’s a symbiotic relationship, we’ve known that for a long time, but now we know, for instance, that some fungi can pair up with different species of algae to make different lichens. How can we reliably name something after it’s fungus if that fungus can pair up with different things to make multiple different ‘species’? And as of 2016 we know that lichens can have up to four different players: a fungus, an algae, a yeast, and (in some families) a second fungus, previously thought to be parasitic on the lichen itself. 

I will personally argue that lichens are an ecological event. To me, this theory gets down to lichen reproduction, which is….completely off the shits. 

Lichens can reproduce in a few different ways, the simplest ones being 1. a piece of lichen breaks off and lands in a fitting environment, creating a new lichen that’s a clone of the mother system, and/or 2. a lichen has special organs that release specially-made ‘mini lichens’ that have the main components packaged together into little ‘spores’ (these organs are called isidia and soridia, and look slightly different), creating a similar result to #1 with a clone of the mother system. 

Now, you may be wondering: ‘But lichens have sexual structures. can’t they have like, Lichen Sex™?’. Which. Like. This is where it gets wild, because it ties back to the ecological mystery of how lichens ‘make new lichens from scratch’ so to speak. 

The thing is, those sexual structures don’t have the components paired together. They only produce sexually-made spores of the fungus, and if these spores land in the right conditions, they won’t form a lichen, they’ll form a non-lichenized version of that fungus. So, conventionally, as we currently understand it, the way for them to form a new lichen would be for two compatible spores- one algae and one fungus, or like, one algae and one fungus or one yeast, we don’t know how those other components fit into the equation yet– to meet in the right conditions, under which case the pair recognizes each other and starts to spontaneously go down an entirely different developmental path to become a lichen. Keep in mind that lichen and algae spores are like…everywhere in the air and in the world around us, just the majority of them don’t find the proper growing conditions and die, so this does happen enough to make all the lichens we see on a day to day basis.

But. There are agonizing mysteries about this process. For example:

-We do not know how the algae and fungal spores, when they meet, know that they’re compatible in the first place. Like, on a cellular level. 

-We do know that after a certain point, the organisms involved are locked into their developmental path. They need to meet at an extremely young age (as spores) to become a lichen. If a mature fungus and a mature algae meet, nothing happens, even if they would have been compatible as spores.

-Science, to my knowledge, still has not yet been able to replicate the ‘lichens being made from scratch’ process in a lab. The spores will recognize each other and start developing on a microscopic level, and then they’ll just….stop developing and die, which is why we can only produce new lichens in a lab by growing sterilized fragments from old lichens. Whether or not we’ve just been like, missing all the ‘ingredients’ and you need a yeast or second fungus or something to finish the process, I have no idea. 

In conclusion: Lichens are mysterious soups. Lichens, to me, aren’t a thing that lives, but more like a thing that happens between living things. It’s an event of several different things coming together to proliferate on a tree or a rock or wherever, and they are everywhere, and we do not know everything about what they are or how they work. Some people, again, will call them ‘superorganisms’, which isn’t wrong either, but I personally like to think about them in a weird like…..temporal sense? Idk man they haunt me every day of my life. 

[botaurus-exilis]

Archaeopteryx

[injuries-in-dust]

COMIC BY PETFOOLERY

[mushroomgothic]

after-life (2022)

paper mache, other recycled materials, acrylic paint

[mushroomgothic]

here’s me for scale

[normal-horoscopes]

Every time Native Americans were mentioned in my education they were mentioned alongside this one native staple food made from acorns ground into a sort of flour/meal/cereal. I have wanted to try that shit for decades now I bet it rules. There has to be a native restaurant somewhere that serves an authentic version of it and I want to try it so bad.

[flagellant]

CT I am so happy to tell you that Wiiwish fucks severely and is way easier to make than you'd think.

[normal-horoscopes]

Please I desire the acorn meal

[flagellant]

Assuming you have the right variety of acorns (I am assuming correctly bc I know where you live), follow the steps:

-Get the acorns -Crack open said acorns, pull out the cotlydons and set them aside. -Grind those bitches into flour. You can use a normal food processor for this nowadays. -You're now gonna wash the flour several times until it loses its bitterness completely. This is how it becomes safe for consumption, bc Yokuts/Chumash/various other Central Californian Natives are the fucking royalty of parboiling shit until you can eat it and it tastes good. You now have authentic acorn mash. Let it dry a bit and then cook it in a hot skillet. You can add shit like cinnamon and sugar for a sweeter treat, or add rosemary and sage for some authentically herby savory nonsense.

Tadaaaa. Wiiwish.

[normal-horoscopes]

Any note on what the most authentic seasoning would be?

[flagellant]

The salt and rosemary and sage would be my personal thought process on it, since those would be straight up what we had/have available, but for "authenticity" it'd be unseasoned. I liked the savory version better when I gave it my shot. It was sorta like focaccia?

[flagellant]

Also I want to be very clear to your followers: This recipe is frankly only really possible for Central Valley CA folk. There's a very specific species of oak we harvest from native to the area, you can't just substitute any old acorn, it can be dangerous to do that + it probably won't work as well. Trying to use a different kind of acorn would probably be more similar to a non-Californian native version of it, but I 1. Don't know anythin bout those and 2. Know enough about acorns to know you don't just randomly experiment.

[classically-lit-memes4u]

defend my thesis? like with a sword?

[oliviaalexandraamores]

Colorful Sea Urchins

[wyldefungi]

Lichens and Turkey Tail

Fine Art America

[linddzz]

I’m very much a proponent of “food not lawns” but I’m also fucking realistic that a ton of people do not have the resources/time/energy and getting into gardening is daunting as fuck. I’ll excitedly encourage it but if people can’t or even just don’t want to then that’s FINE. I hate the posts full of pictures of idealistic food lawns. Even outside of the actual growing and care, just processing a harvest takes so much damn time and More Energy and More Resources or Techniques and acting like it’s as simple as “just grow your own food!” is setting people up for a huge letdown when they realize how much that can take

[roach-works]

i watered my garden every single day it didn’t rain last summer. no matter how tired i was, i had to go trundle around with the hose and the watering can. because i didn’t use pesticides, i lost all my pumpkins and squashes to a squash borer. my carrots didn’t really amount to much. all my watermelons died on the vine, tiny. my grape vine still hasn’t fruited. my herbs pretty much universally croaked. my lettuces looked great but were so bitter. i didn’t harvest my cabbages in time and only got to eat one–the slugs got the rest. i planted a bunch of peppers and got almost nothing from them, just weird little gnarled green fists.

then i got an absolutely absurd amount of cucumbers and turned every single jar in my house into a pickle container. i’m still working my way through the six gallon freezer bags of frozen beefsteak tomatoes that august produced.

your garden will produce way less of a lot of stuff you want and way more of some stuff you’re not prepared to consume or preserve. you have to water, to weed, to think about sun exposure, to debate about pesticides.

i love gardening! it’s great, it keeps you grounded, it feels wonderful to materially contribute to the local ecosystem, to see the wasps and spiders and bees and butterflies, and fresh tomatoes are delicious! but it’s SO MUCH MORE WORK THAN A LAWN.

[moniquill]

Hi, indigenous person here with good news: The food not lawn doesn’t have to be food -for humans- 

You can do amazing work for your local ecosystem by replacing your lawn with native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees. Which have the added benefit of generally not needing any looking after -because they are native and evolved to be there-

The following infographics are going to be North American (and specifically Northeast) centric because guess where I’m from:

[linddzz]

Reblogging for excellent suggestion and recommendations for North American folks! I have a native pollinator garden and even my 3x8 (soon to be expanding) patch brings in so many different small bees and other pollinators I’d never seen before. I can confirm they need very little care, and a lot of native solitary bees are so so little and amazing.

(somewhat related note, if you are planting a non native ornamental, RESEARCH and make sure it isn’t invasive to the area! Down with Japanese honeysuckle.)

[afloweroutofstone]

It’s weird how little Indonesia is discussed in any way at all considering it’s the 4th largest country on Earth by population. Like 3.5% of the world lives in Indonesia and I know literally nothing about it. I should change that

[argumate]

I like to point out occasionally that Russia has 144 million people, smaller than Nigeria at 186 million and Indonesia at 261 million.

(meanwhile Australia, as large as it is, contains 24 million people).

[alexanderrm]

Also consider: The island of Java alone at 141 million people has nearly as many people as Russia and more than Japan. In the west it’s the 3rd most famous thing by that name, after the coffee variety named after the island and the programming language named after the coffee.

[blackblocberniebros-deactivated]

The Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has the most population of any sub-national entity in the world and if it were its own country would be the 5th most populous, after Indonesia.

[argumate]

the population of greater Shanghai is the same as the population of Australia.

[argumate]

the population of greater Chongqing is the same as the population of Canada.

[sixth-light]

always important to remember

[steelblaidd]

Life in perspective

[lilly-isnt-here-deactivated2022]

An important part of why Indonesia isn’t discussed that much is because it is not at most times engaging in complicated economic and military imperialism across the world against other global powers.

Yet.

[lindagoesmushrooming]