Vegan

communism or socialism or something idk anymore. definitely fxck capitalism though WhenYourFavouriteDies

[lost-carcosa]

[mightyoctopus]

[ID: Drawing of three insects captioned “A helpful guide”. Bee: Friend who makes wax and lots of honey. Bumble bee: Friend who is extra fuzzy and really loves flowers. Wasp: Friend who pollinates and eats pests but needs more personal space. /end ID]

[thememedaddy]

[the-final-sif]

So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.

Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.

So yeah, there's actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I'd take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I'd be delighted.

[straawberries]

can ppl pls reblog this version

[us-nowhere-girls]

Well damn. I was also like wtf is this stupid slime tank and then I read the rest and my mind got blown

[siorca]

this is so fucking funny I love sharks

[great-and-small]

If you ever spot a Tricolored heron and have a little free time, I highly recommend stopping to watch them fish for a while. The speed, focus, and grace they display during the hunt is captivating.

[agnesmontague]

ive invented (note: dubious claim) something i call the bear diet which is mostly fruits and vegetables with fish as the main protein source and something like once a month you eat a few hyperprocessed foods of your liking because that is when you, the bear, raid a dumpster in the suburbs

[stellarskyes]

after the hyperprocessed foods, do you take tranquilizers to simulate getting captured by animal control and returned to the wild?

[agnesmontague]

i would settle for melatonin gummies but well. knock yourself out

[headspace-hotel]

I feel that "lawn care" as promoted in the USA can be considered some kind of pseudoscience.

It doesn't have the conspiracy-theory-adjacent qualities of virtually every other "pseudoscience," which makes me hesitant to call it that, but the theory and method of it is still full of totally unsupported junk.

[headspace-hotel]

Where do I start?

I'm a gardener and so are the majority of people I spend time around. If you are mowing 3+ times a week and regularly spending money on fertilizer, soil tests, herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides, you have chosen the most expensive, time consuming thing you could possibly do with your yard. Unless you are a farmer as your livelihood, NOTHING else you could grow is that high maintenance. Nothing.

Most turfgrasses are invasive species. I said it.

The practice of "nuking" your lawn (killing everything in it and "starting over")...If you have a so-called "weed problem" this is probably the worst thing you can do.

Listen to me very carefully: "Weed" seeds are everywhere. There is, at all times, a supply of seeds lying dormant in the soil, waiting for the right conditions to sprout. (It's called the "soil seed bank" and you can look it up.) They are capable of "waiting" for years, even decades. Furthermore, most "weed" species spread by wind, meaning you can't physically eliminate them from an outdoor area unless you...surround your entire yard with an incredibly fine mesh netting and never leave, I guess.

Heavy management will make your "weed" problem progressively worse and worse because those plants are specifically adapted to colonize barren areas that recently underwent disastrous events that killed off most life.

Basically all plants are adapted to live in the company of other organisms, and suffer when there are no other plants around. "Weeds" with deep taproots penetrate into and aerate the soil. Clover puts nitrogen in the ground that other plants need. Low ground covers keep the soil moist and stop the sun from baking your grass to a crisp.

The plant "taking over" your lawn is probably not killing your grass. Your grass is dying and it's being replaced by something more suited to the environment. This is supposed to happen.

Monocultures are notoriously susceptible to disease and mass die-offs. "Oh no a big patch of my lawn is dying!" Yeah, that happens when you plant monocultures. You set yourself up for this.

"Why is there a bare patch in my yard/why won't grass grow well here?" Because in nature, each plant has a relatively narrow range of conditions it likes to grow in, so other plants it might otherwise compete with can stick to their preferred conditions and nobody has to compete directly. Win-win. Not all parts of your yard have the exact same amount of sun, moisture, etc. Expecting the plant life to look the same is unrealistic.

Let me make this very clear: It is fully impossible to "solve" the problem of plants popping up in your yard that aren't your one favored variety of grass. You will be buying herbicides for the rest of your life, and it will get worse, not better, because willy-nilly use of herbicides is leading to plants developing herbicide resistance faster than we can come up with new herbicides.

[headspace-hotel]

@kidpixdeluxe-4

From my limited knowledge of ecology, "but this is what natives have been saying for YEARS" basically sums up literally all work that has been done with ecology in north america

[dramatic-dolphin]

i think i make the fake strawberry post in every may or june, but i just want to spread the word. too many times i've seen people online say they thought wild strawberries tasted bland and gross, when what actually happened is they were tricked by the fake strawberry!! genuine wild strawberries are some of the most amazing concentrated little flavor bombs you can find in the wild.

[headspace-hotel]

If the berry points straight up it's Mock Strawberry. It tastes like water with a hint of glucose and styrofoam

the real strawberries point towards the ground and usually multiple grow on one stem

[yoshitaka-koga]

ミソサザイ

[2percentsugar]

the fact that "eco" and "ethical" are two separate concerns in the global north, and that "eco" is a much more popular concern, with many "eco" products being made in actual sweatshops, is a big part of why i am The Joker

[2percentsugar]

if you think this is an exaggeration or splitting hairs where it doesn't matter:

i used to work at a Local Organic Produce store that's popular with the lefties in my city who are interested in food justice. i quit for a lot of reasons, mostly the boss, but something i will always remember is one of our suppliers coming in to drop off produce, being told her check wasn't ready, and her laughing and responding it didn't matter -- even a low bank account was more than enough to pay the migrants who picked her produce. i am not filling in any blanks here. she said this.

after quitting, this was a common story i told people about my time there. some then became annoyed at me, acting like i was a wokescold trying to undermine the store's "eco" mission with unrelated "ethical" concerns. but, like -- if food justice isn't for the people making food, who the fuck is it for?

like, don't get me wrong. my contention here is that the things go hand in hand, and that something which is unethical isn't actually eco. after all, humans are a part of the fucking ecosystem, and if a product can only be made by unsustainably exploiting humans, then it's unsustainable. doesn't matter which chemicals were used in making it, or whether or not animals were factory farmed.

[falseficus]

they *cannot* be separated. a product cannot be either eco or ethical — it must be both. a product that is made through human suffering cannot be eco for the reasons you said; a product that causes human suffering by contributing to the destruction of the ecosystem cannot be ethical. it must be both and we must insist on both

[venndaai]

have you guys heard about the greenland shark. some crazy shit happening there.

[venndaai]

they are sexually mature at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OLD.

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

ma'am you are delightfully strange and I'm privileged to share a planet with you

[fluorescentbrains]

this post prompted me to refresh my memory on Greenland Shark Facts and this detail about how they feed goes so hard

just vacuuming up their unsuspecting prey. whole !

[muffinlance]

Good news good news good news! Recent research suggests the eye parasites do NOT blind them!

Eye-opening research: Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism

Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk sits in her office, eyes fixed on the computer monitor in front of her. "You see it move its eye," says the UC Ir

I <3 you a normal amount Greenland sharks

[ofools]

not gonna say it again!!!!

a BOG is a wetland that is acidic

a FEN is a wetland that is alkaline

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

FINALLY someone said it!!!!!!!

[quasi-normalcy]

a SWAMP is a wetland whose vegetation consists of trees or other woody plants

a MARSH is a wetland with other forms of vegetation

[lesbianshepard]

#A LITTLE LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK

[villainessbian]

a MANGAL is a swamp whose soil concentrates high amounts of salt and very low amounts of oxygen, supporting little else than mangrove trees

a PEATLAND is a wetland whose soil concentrates decaying organic matter, becoming peat

[big-smiling-monkey]

Oh yeah baby, keep coming at me with watery environmental states

[dimetrodone]

People horrifically fucking up facts about evolution and genetics too support their stupid beliefs or to seem smart and “rational” is probably one of my big pet peeves 

[bogleech]

Yeah. An enormous number of racists, misogynists, homophobes and transphobes I’ve met eventually whip out something about evolutionary biology and they never, ever, ever, ever have the slightest shadow of even a half-right idea what any of it means or ever cite a claim ever actually made by a scientific study.

Here’s a quick handy reference list or anyone who isn’t sure:

Homosexuality does exist in almost all social species.

“Alpha males” are not a real phenomenon and in fact the most aggressive males tend to be the least reproductively successful.

“Survival of the fittest” simply means that the success of a species hinges on how well it “fits” its environment. It does not mean that stronger or smarter individuals are supposed to succeed. Those things can even be a detriment in nature by wasting too many resources.

“Race” is not a biological concept. Someone who looks different from you has the same human genes, just a different grab-bag of dominant traits.

Evolution is not a march towards higher complexity, more intelligence or even more adaptability. It’s just a fluctuation of characteristics dictated by environmental pressures and mutation. A slime mold isn’t “less evolved” than a hawk, just adapted for success under different parameters.

People didn’t evolve “from apes.” It’s more complicated than that. We are a category of ape, sharing a common ancestor with the other apes.

No human on Earth is “closer” to an evolutionary ancestor than any other. We all descended from the same one.

Neanderthals were also a “sibling” species of ours. We didn’t evolve from them.

Some of us did, however, cross-breed with Neandethal man. It is exclusively non-African races, such as white people, who still carry hybrid human/Neanderthal genes. Whoops, sorry “white purity” skinheads, you’re actually mixed with a whole other species.

[sunny-butch-deactivated20220919]

Some more stuff!

Humans are actually more genetically homogeneous than most people suspect. This is possibly due to a population bottleneck at some point in our evolutionary past. Two chimpanzees from different sides of a jungle are likely more genetically different to each other than any two human beings in the world.

Our big brains may help us use tools, but what was really principal in their development was the need for empathy, communication, and cooperation.

Humans. Are. Social. So social it drove an incredibly energetically costly increase in our brain size.  Don’t believe anyone who says its our nature to fight “every man for themself.” We’re humans, not bears. We fight for each other.

And we always have. Fossil remains are found of ancient humans who bore signs of crucial mobility impairments that lived to notable ages. Some even have sticks or other mobility aids – community care and support is our way. We don’t cast off those with impairments, we stand by them.

Human sexual dimorphism is on a decreasing trend. Our ancestors had greater difference in canine size and overall size. Our dimorphism gap has gotten smaller.

Occam’s razor is the principal that whatever is the simplest explanation is probably the most likely one. Don’t believe someone who says the reason we evolved bipedalism is so that males could carry gifts to females to woo them. Yes, this is a real ‘theory’ on how bipedalism evolved.

Skin tone is an adaptation of UV levels vs vitamin D levels. Both come from the sun. UV is harmful, so where sun is plentiful populations develop a darker skin tone for more protection. The skin needs sun to create vitamin D, so where sun is scarce, the skin tone lightens to allow more sun in. This is literally all it is.

Final thing: No one’s mind is really equipped to fully understand how long a billion years is, or a million, or even tens of thousands of years. Evolution takes place over a loooong time. Its very, very, slow, slower than we can really comprehend. We can’t “stand in the way” of natural selection by caring for our ill. We don’t need to “help” evolution in any way. It inevitably happens, but not on any sort of timescale we could possibly affect, so don’t fall for anyone that tells you not to “stand in the way” of natural selection. That’s fascism, and its utterly pseudo-scientific.

Not to mention natural selection doesn’t have a “will” that you can stand in the way of. Its not an entity with wants, its a millions-year long process. And its impossible for our decisions to “stand in its way.” Our decisions to care for one another are what brought our species where it is, plain and simple.

[melissajanart]

The bird that started my love of bird watching, bird drawing, and overall obsession with birds, the beautiful nuthatch.

This is also a start to a new collection, maybe the name will give it away?

[acti-veg]

‘While bats can only sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets, dolphins can peer inside theirs. If a dolphin echolocates on you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton. It can likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women. It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their buoyancy.

It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.

Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’

-Ed Yong, An Immense World

[namu-the-orca]

Cetacean echolocation is one of those things that boggles your mind once you really start to think about the implications. They can see each others' hearts beating fast with fear or excitement. They can see if another dolphin is healthy, or pregnant; how the fetus is doing; if they have ingested debris. Their echolocation is also incredibly precise: a bottlenose dolphin could discriminate between cilinders differing in wall thickness by just 0.23 mm (0.009 inch) from 8 meters away!! And they certainly notice when something is off.

I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.

It was such a wild experience, and offered such a cool insight into how dolphins experience their world. I'll never forget it.

[boomer-mythology-destroyer]

[maykitz]

i have no idea what the context is but i can make a pretty good guess

[headspace-hotel]

Pasteurization is literally "heat the milk up to a high enough temperature that it kills the bacteria, then let it cool down" This is the scary sinister technology they fear

[hotvampireadjacent]

Great photo from birds facing forward

[birds-in-posts]

Canada goose (Branta canadensis)