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Good Day, My Lovelies

@finders-keepers-is-not-a-thing

15•she/her•cis•Scorpio
Up 2 fight @ any moment
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kianlawley
person: but what if your parents had aborted YOU
me: well okay for starters i wouldn't have been forced to hear that stupid ass comment you just made
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🐋 Help us to save the marine animals 🐋

The role plastic products play in the daily lives of people all over the world is interminable. We could throw statistics at you all day long (e.g. Upwards of 300 MILLION tons of plastic are consumed each year), but the impact of these numbers border on inconceivable.

For those living on the coasts, a mere walk on the beach can give anyone insight into how staggering our addiction to plastic has become as bottles, cans, bags, lids and straws (just to name a few) are ever-present. In other areas that insight is more poignant as the remains of animal carcasses can frequently be observed; the plastic debris that many of them ingested or became entangled in still visible long after their death. Sadly, an overwhelming amount of plastic pollution isn’t even visible to the human eye, with much of the pollution occurring out at sea or on a microscopic level.

The short-lived use of millions of tons of plastic is, quite simply, unsustainable and dangerous. We have only begun to see the far-reaching consequences of plastic pollution and how it affects all living things. According to a study from Plymouth University, plastic pollution affects at least 700 marine species, while some estimates suggest that at least 100 million marine mammals are killed each year from plastic pollution. Here are some of the marine species most deeply impacted by plastic pollution.

  1. Sea Turtles
  2. Seals and Sea Lions
  3. Seabirds
  4. Fish
  5. Whales and Dolphins

More than ever, the fate of the ocean is in our hands. To be good stewards and leave a thriving ocean for future generations, we need to make changes big and small wherever we are. Every purchase supports Ocean Conservation. We give 15% of our profits to Organizations that bravely fight for Marine Conservation.

EVERY TIME YOU GO TO THE BEACH PICK UP SOME PLASTIC NOT THE SEA SHELLS!! ANYTHING HELPS A BIT! 🌊🐳

This is SUPER IMPORTANT.

Save our Earth, it’s the only one we have!

This is exactly what I was looking for. It’s comfortable, and well designed. Please help to save our oceans! 🌊💙

Save our planet, save our oceans, save ocean life, save the future. This all makes me so sad, and it should make everyone else sad too. The earth is dying it’s our fault. Maybe not directly (if you don’t live in a location that is remotely near the ocean), but you can at least help to be a solution.

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with summer coming fast i just wanna share a psa on wasps and why they’re good too.

- they do serve a purpose in the ecosystem. wasps are vital predators of aphids and blackflies. with no predation, one cabbage aphid could cover our planet in 822 million tonnes of bugs because they’re so fertile, as estimated by zoologist mark carwardine. not only do wasps eat for themselves, but they need to provide for their grubs too, so that’s even more aphids getting picked off every day. parasitic wasps of the family trichogrammatidae are used in horticulture for biological control of pests. trichogramma galloi is used to control sugarcane borers and encarsia formosa is used to control whitefly, a pest of tomato, cucumber, aubergine and strawberry. on some farms they even replace chemical pesticides.

- they are effective pollinators with some species contributing massively to the maintenance of plant populations. there are over 800 species of fig tree and each one has its own specific fig wasp. without one another, neither the fig nor fig wasp can complete their life-cycle - a clear example of co-evolution that has been successful for over 60 million years. Figs are a keystone species in tropical regions worldwide – their fruit supports the diets of at least 1,274 mammals and birds, meaning that the extinction of fig wasps would therefore be catastrophic in tropical ecosystems. furthermore, at least 100 orchid species rely on european wasps and common wasps for pollination.

- paper wasps and potter wasps make amazing artists. they can construct flawless nests made of wood and create stunning miniature pot nests out of nothing but mud and saliva. in one amazing case, a colony of paper wasps constructed a rainbow-coloured nest using coloured sheets of paper as shown on the right. (menchetti 2016)

- wasps are socially intelligent. not only can paper wasps recognise each other by the colour patterns on their faces, but they can still do so after at least one week apart. (sheehan and tibbetts 2008) european wasps can learn to recognise human faces. despite having no evolutionary reason for doing so, they construct holistic representations of complex images to remember a specific human face.  (avarguès-weber et al 2018) sand wasps tend to two or three chambers each day. each chamber is in a different location and each larva is at a different developmental stage. it was found that they learn the configuration of landmarks around each concealed chamber in order to find them. this means that the wasp learns where the chambers are and which action is needed at each. (baerends 1939)

- the world’s smallest known insect is a fairy wasp! at only 139-240 micrometres long, dicopomorpha echmepterygis is smaller than some paramecium and amoeba species. the fairy wasp family also contains the smallest flying insect, kikiki huna. adult lifespans are very short, only lasting for a few days. several species are used as biological pest control agents. some species are even aquatic, using their wings as tiny paddles to swim around.

- social wasps are frequent models for batesian mimicry and müllerian mimicry. this means that non-stinging insects use wasps as a base to appear threatening to predators. their presence thus changes how other insects evolve. even bees such as the nomad bee have evolved to mimic wasps. (yellowjacket wasp on the left, clearwing moth on the right.)

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bogleech

At the few people snarking on “oh we’re all about defending wasps now? What about [insert human rights issue],” you know it’s possible to care about multiple things. Also, our planet is undergoing a mass extinction event and overuse of pesticide is another big reason for it. Obviously most of that is at the industrial level, but insects can still use all the public support they can get. We long thought they were super-survivors who would be here long after the rest of us died out, but insects of almost every variety are plummeting even in what people thought were the healthiest nature preserves.