you WISH you were eating sweet mulberries from a stranger’s overgrown tree at twilight in a silent neighborhood
Hey Op, are you the whitetail doe who sneaks into my back yard at night to eat mullberries? If so, you're my favorite urban wildlife neighbor.
i'm being doxxed
Favorite parts of the newsletter (not all)
Link to interview:
ALSO!
I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
I’ve seen a few ~aesthetic~ photos of rock stacks in rivers recently and this is just a reminder that you are destroying habitat when you move rocks around in rivers and streams.
In addition to dragonfly nymphs, rocky river beds are home to lots of other larval invertebrates like damselflies, mayflies, water beetles, caddisflies, stoneflies, and a bunch of dipterans. Not to mention lots of fish and amphibians!
Plus large scale rock stacking can change the flow of a stream and lead to increased erosion.
Anyway dragonfly for admiration:
Calico pennant by nbdragonflyguy
Everything is something’s habitat. You might as well not go outside for fear of stepping on some larval beetle.
This is hugely missing the point. The idea is to enjoy what’s left of our natural spaces while having as little an impact as possible. It’s not difficult to avoid intentionally destroying habitat. I recommend looking into the Leave No Trace principle which is very important for conservation. Cynicism doesn’t help anything.
You can read more about Leave No Trace here.
A few rock stacks here and there wouldn’t have much of an impact alone. But in parks that see thousands or even millions of visitors each year, when you have people like you saying, “sure, literal scientists and park rangers are telling me not to do this, but surely that doesn’t apply to ME,” the effect is huge. Please attempt to see the bigger picture. You are not so special that YOU get to ignore the rules and continue intentionally destroying habitat even after you’ve been told it’s harmful.
Benthic invertebrates in streams are a CRITICAL part of a lot of food webs — because they are so diverse, they have a lot of feeding strategies that move calories up the food web and nutrients into the ecosystem around them. Some consume oil-rich diatom films, a critical source of essential fatty acids throughout the food web, some shred leaves and twigs into tiny bits that decompose more easily, allowing streams to remain clear and flowing, some filter out particulates from the water making it clearer, some are predators, concentrating nutrients — and they do this as larvae, and then the adults fly out of the stream, bringing the nutrients and calories from the stream to the surrounding landscape. The whole ecosystem is richer because of the diversity of benthic macroinvertebrates — which is why it’s important to preserve their habitat, though this is more “maintain dissolved oxygen levels by protecting temperature and limiting sedimentation” and “have a mixture of shaded and unshaded stream reaches” day to day. I do think “Don’t destroy the physical habitat for art projects” is an easy action to take but like. It’s fine to do that OUT of the creek? Build the stacks of rocks on ridge tops, where they aren’t habitat for stressed critical species? (caveat: I am in western North America and I have limited understanding of other parts of the world.)
A good addition that goes into more detail about WHY these critters are important to their particular ecosystems that I didn’t bother with on the original post because I didn’t think it would get so much traction.
But I’d say don’t stack rocks anywhere in parks. If you want to stack rocks on your private property, go nuts.
there is a demon in your house named CARBON MONOXIDE. he enchants your mind with confusion and your body with exhaustion. you need to call a powerful exorcist named HVAC TECHNICIAN
this notion that if you're an adult still on tumblr it's bc something is wrong doesn't sit right with me... unfortunately I can't refute it bc there is something wrong with me
For those who don’t know, r/place is where you can place one single pixel on a huge canvas--and are then locked out of placing another pixel for a long while. The amount of collaboration necessary to successfully do this is incredible.
Message AF!!
THE. POST. OFFICE. IS. SELF. FUNDED.
SOURCE BECAUSE I AM A GOOD SCIENTIST: https://facts.usps.com/top-facts/
exhale
and
prepare coffee
reblogging this again because it SHOULD cost money we SHOULD be pouring tax dollars into it and sending letters should be FREE and packages should be LOW COST and FAST because we SUBSIDIZE with community money.
I swear to God there's a whole swath of people in the US who will not REST until we're all charged by the minute for the water we drink, the air we breathe, and every blink we take.
Stop coming for the USPS. Not only is it self-funded as mentioned above, but "it's not profitable" should NEVER be an argument against services that support basic needs. We should be working toward making things like public transit, healthcare, utilities, etc. entirely free-to-use via government funding, not arguing to whittle things down for not being Amazon-esque-enough.
The Economist can eat my ass.
The company I work for has 4 different logins for basically the same thing that I constantly screw up what password goes to what, that also makes you reset your password every x months, that also makes you 2 emails, that also requires you to download an app to get verification codes that change every 10 seconds, that also has a calendar to select PTO that starts at year 1900 and only goes to 2019. Fully functional.
rip to all the “fuckyeah___” blogs that carried our society at one point </3
we are in the midst of a true Real One
This is terrifying rhetoric but I need to add that my stupid ass thought the fish changed its sex out of spite after getting transphobic comments. Like it could read and that was the catalyst
Anytime i see a bunch of pride flags i have to restrain myself from saying "where mexico" bc i doubt anyone will know I'm referencing this
picture i got at pride last week; here mexico
NEW TUMBLR UPDATE:
You can only like 4 posts a day and if you even think of reblogging we're going to blow your brains out
