Packstone Excavation
2023, 51x44 inches, hand dyed cotton with textile discharge painting and cotton thread (hand quilted)
i was thinking about my fossil soup stones I collected in michigan last summer and naturally had to make a quilt. all the fossil shapes were hand painted with decolorant instead of appliqué as I was thinking about the process of excavation and removal.
Scientists spent a decade intensively monitoring the impacts of a large government-funded experiment at Hillesden, a 1,000-hectare commercial arable farm in Buckinghamshire. Beginning in 2005, this involved creating several wildlife habitats, including seed-bearing plants for birds, wildflowers for pollinators and tussocky grass margins to support a range of birds, insects and small mammals.
[…]
Overall yields at Hillesden were maintained – and enhanced for some crops – despite the loss of agricultural land for habitat creation. The areas taken out of production were difficult and unproductive to farm, and the other areas benefited from boosted pollinator numbers and pest-eating birds and insects.
[…]
“Historic policies in England tried to get us to produce food everywhere. But now we are realising that we can increase our average yield by stopping growing food in areas of land that aren’t productive, and in these areas we can make space for nature. We know there are benefits from having more nature in the farm, we know we can improve farm biodiversity without affecting yields.”
You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.
For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:
Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning
Don’t fuck with flamingos
….. Didn’t know most of that
Huh… so that’s why zoos don’t put them somewhere warm during winter.
Oh yeah, this leaves out what I *did* know about them–they can also survive hypersalinity. That is, water so salty it kills practically everything else–water so salty it burns your skin.
American flamingos just drink that shit
(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.
When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.
It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:
Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.
Earth is an amazing place.
STAY SAFE!! [ID: the Gilbert Baker pride flag with the words “Happy pride to all those who are unable to celebrate openly and safely. You are loved and seen!” in all-caps black text over it. /end ID]
Stop! THIEF!
There is absolutely no way to predict this video
we can all learn something of resiliency from these beautiful, deeply stupid creatures
sunfish are intelligent actually, they're active swimmers and dive and hunt during the day while hanging out near the surface at night. that's right, they're actually predators.
read this: (source)
sunfish are even strong enough swimmers to breach, (insane considering they average 540 – 4,400 lbs!!!) which is a much different image than the useless floating dummies that everyone seems to think they are :[
all this sunfish disparagement drives me wild. you can learn so much from the ocean sunfish because its actually an ingeniously evolved fish that's perfectly adapted to migrate between depths.
here's some additional reading: (Tweet) (Informational article)
People tagging like gore or animal death need to know the one in the first image is possibly just fine! That entire area of the body is pure muscle and it looks already healed. It will just be living its life like a bitten cookie.
Looking at sunfish yes there is some muscle there, but the tail(called the clavis, as it's actually a fusion of the anal and dorsal fin) is mostly cartilage
So it wouldnt have a lot of blood to bleed and have a decent chance of healing over, though id worry about it's diving ability. That being said the clavis is a rudder, not propulsion(which comes from the still separate parts of the dorsal and anal fin) so maybe it's steering is just a little wonky. The type of mola mola looks like a hoodwinker sunfish, though it could be a young mola mola/ocean sunfish too. My personal favorite is the slender sunfish. Added the baby because there just such odd things. They have a vertical mouth and mostly eat squid!
What do you mean a vertical mouth?!?
Oh my god
aaaahhhhh i love them!
Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this
Excerpt from this story from the Washington Post:
Wildfires in southeastern Canada’s Nova Scotia province have damaged or destroyed 200 homes near Halifax while forcing more than 16,000 people to evacuate. Thick plumes of smoke are also finding their way into the northeastern United States.
The expansive fires in Nova Scotia are of unusual intensity for the region, fueled by abnormally hot and dry weather. Some places have seen little to no rain this month, and much of the maritime zone was already abnormally dry as of late April.
Of the fires burning in Nova Scotia, the largest is over 24,700 acres (10,000 hectares) and is still out of control.
For comparison, in the past five years combined, 11,600 acres (4,700 hectares) burned in Nova Scotia, according to the province’s Department of Natural Resources and Renewables.
It’s just the latest fire emergency in Canada after historic conflagrations in the west over recent weeks.
Booooooy how people don’t want to look at this.
Arguably, with age, the majority of people do become disabled.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
“Why should healthy people pay for sick people?” “Because the only things separating healthy people from sick people are time and luck.”
All the previous reblogs with commentary being in 2019 is fucking haunting.
TUMBLR I HAVE JUST LEARNED SOMETHING AMAZING AND MUST INFLICT IT IN YOU
There is a Japanese water beetle called Regimbartia attenuata. It has developed an incredible adaptation to be being eaten by pond frogs.
It walks out the frog’s butt.
The beetles get swallowed whole, and usually that would be considered Kinda Fatal, but this particular species is just like “DID YOU THINK A FROG’S DIGESTIVE TRACT COULD HOLD ME?!” and proceeds to walk through the frog’s intestines, then presumably stimulate the frog’s hind gut with its legs so that the frog poops. The beetles emerge headfirst and 93% of them survive and live on for weeks afterward.
Apparently some beetles can do this obstacle course in six minutes! (Usually takes a few hours, but some people will speedrun ANYTHING.)
Isn’t that COOL?!
