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A community for the discussion of the environment, climate change, ecology, sustainability, nature, and pictures of cute wild animals.
Socialism is the only path out of the global ecological crisis.
Don't know if they're weevils, they're tiny brownish beetles (the dark dots you see in the front, for example).
No more pictures because I threw it away before they could spread to all of my kitchen. It looked like they couldn't leave the jar, so hopefully they didn't.
If you zoom in, there is a drop of venom on its stinger.
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/66368
A majority of Utah’s residents opposed shrinking Bears Ears National Monument before President Donald Trump drastically slashed its size last week, according to multiple polls conducted over the past few years. Those findings contrast with statements from Utah’s political leaders who argued that the cuts reflected what Utahns want.
President Donald Trump signed two executive orders shrinking Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments by roughly 90 percent each. He announced the change flanked by members of Utah’s congressional delegation and Governor Spencer Cox, all of them Republicans. Trump’s proclamation said the move “will better align the use of these public lands with the public interest,” citing the region’s deposits of critical minerals such as copper, nickel, and uranium, among others.
On Monday, hundreds gathered outside the Governor’s Mansion in Salt Lake City to protest the cuts, part of efforts organized by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance across the state to pressure lawmakers.
The two monuments, which totaled about 3.3 million acres in southern Utah before Trump’s executive orders, were created by Democratic presidents despite protests from Utah’s elected Republican leaders.
During the signing ceremony in the Oval Office, Utah Representative Celeste Maloy, a Republican, said that supporters of shrinking the monuments included “the locals who are worried about losing multiple uses on these federal lands,” and said that Trump was “listening to the people of Utah” in reducing the size of both monuments.
“It was very unfair to the people of Utah,” Trump said, “and now fairness has been brought back.”
But separate polls conducted before Trump shrank the monuments show that most Utahns and residents of other Mountain West states favored keeping their existing designations.
“It is very contradictive of our findings,” said Michaelann Nelson, a professor of environmental rhetoric at the Utah State University campus in Price. “They’re kind of picking and choosing which Utahns they’re paying attention to and listening to.”
In surveys conducted in 2024 and 2025, researchers with Utah State University found that 61 percent of Utahns either supported or strongly supported preserving Bears Ears as a national monument, with just 19 percent opposed or strongly opposed. Some 53 percent of respondents opposed or strongly opposed reducing Bears Ears, while 26 percent supported the idea. The remaining 21 percent neither supported nor opposed shrinking the monument.
Utah Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla, Autumn Gillard of the Piute Indian Tribe of Utah, and others join a rally to protect public lands at the Utah Capitol in January 2025.
Francisco Kjolseth / The Salt Lake TribuneNearly half — 46 percent — opposed Utah pursuing legal action to overturn the Bears Ears National Monument designation, which was initially created by President Barack Obama in 2016 under the Antiquities Act. It included 1.35 million acres, but has now been reduced to about 121,000 acres.
Grand Staircase-Escalante wasn’t included in the Utah State University study. President Bill Clinton designated that monument in 1996, and it eventually reached nearly 1.9 million acres after some adjustments by Congress. After Trump’s order to cut the monument last week, it now includes just over 181,500 acres.
Nelson, the lead author of the poll, said she focused her surveys on Bears Ears because it was newer and a bigger focus of Utah politicians’ ire at the time. But she expects Utahns’ sentiments toward Grand Staircase-Escalante are similar.
“In some ways, perhaps [Utahns would be] even more in favor of Grand Staircase,” Nelson said, “just because we’ve existed with it for more than 20 years.”
Jessica Schad, a professor of sociology and the director of the Utah State’s Community and Natural Resources Institute, oversaw the survey efforts. She suspects Utahns’ attitudes toward monuments haven’t shifted much in the months since researchers polled them.
“It seems like this issue has become really politicized,” Schad said, “and our politicians aren’t taking into account what residents are preferring.”
The poll included 468 respondents in Utah, and the university tapped sociologists based in rural parts of the state so the results didn’t overrepresent residents in the more urban Wasatch Front, home to Salt Lake City. “We use high-quality, really rigorous survey methods,” Schad said.
Other surveys conducted across eight Mountain West states showed similar sentiments about national monuments to the Utah State University poll. A total of 91 percent of voters in these states wanted existing national monuments kept in place as of January, compared to 88 percent last year and 80 percent in 2017, according to the annual Conservation in the West Poll conducted by Colorado College.
This year’s study included interviews with voters in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. About 24 percent of respondents lived in rural areas or small towns, 24 percent lived in cities, and the rest lived in suburbs. Politically, 36 percent identified as Republicans, including 35 percent who said they supported MAGA; another 36 percent were independent, and 28 percent were Democrats.
The survey found support for existing national monuments nationwide was strong across party affiliations, backed by 87 percent of Republicans, 92 percent of independents, and 96 percent of Democrats. The share of MAGA supporters who wanted to keep existing national monument designations in place grew from 81 percent in 2025 to 87 percent this year.
“We’ve asked about this many times over the years,” said Lori Weigel, a principal with New Bridge Strategies, a Republican public opinion research group that assists Colorado College with its annual poll. “What we have seen very consistently in the data is that people want additional protections for these public lands.”
The poll also found that voters from both parties wanted to prioritize “conservation, recreation, and renewables over fossil fuel development,” according to a statement accompanying the results. A separate December 2024 survey by New Bridge Strategies found 71 percent of Utah voters supported keeping Bears Ears protected as a national monument, and 74 percent felt the same about Grand Staircase-Escalante. Another 75 percent of Utahns surveyed backed a president’s ability to create more national monuments.
Utah’s politicians, including Cox and Senator Mike Lee, have asserted Democratic presidents went too far in designating the two monuments. The 1906 Antiquities Act allows presidents to protect sites of historic and scientific interest as national monuments, but directs presidents to preserve “the smallest area compatible with the proper care” of those lands.
“These multimillion-acre monuments that are bigger than the state of Delaware certainly do not fit that designation,” Cox said at Monday’s event with Trump.
The designations have brought more visitors to the Bears Ears and Escalante areas, a statement issued by the Utah Senate notes. That puts a strain on land management agencies and law enforcement, causing “degradation” at the sites.
When Trump downsized the two monuments during his first term in 2017, records showed mining companies had lobbied administration officials to reduce the boundaries of Bears Ears. The president’s latest orders both cite a need to mine domestic supplies of critical minerals on public lands as part of the justification for reducing Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
During the signing ceremony last week, Trump complained that the previous monument boundaries closed off access to recreation, too. “You can’t do anything. You can’t go hunting. You can’t go fishing. You can’t do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it,” he said.
But the fact is that hunting, fishing, driving off-road vehicles on designated trails, and other recreation are allowed in both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — activities that are sometimes prohibited at other national monuments. Bears Ears also had an intertribal commission that federal agencies consulted for management of the monument and protection of its resources. Trump’s order disbanded that body.
Nearly 90 percent of Utahns supported Native American tribes having a strong role in managing ancestral lands, according to the 2024 New Bridge Strategies survey, and 81 percent said that the incoming Trump administration should keep agreements with tribes in place for managing Bears Ears.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Most Utahns want to protect their national monuments. Trump had other plans. on Jul 22, 2026.
From Grist via This RSS Feed.
The third orchid species I've seen in Colorado. It was at 3000m elevation in a drainage ditch.
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/64339
US President Donald Trump on Monday signed proclamations dramatically shrinking the size of two national monuments in Utah, eliminating roughly 3 million acres of protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante and potentially opening the beloved, wildlife-rich areas to industry exploitation.
Trump's proclamations, issued at the urging of Utah Republicans including Sen. Mike Lee, aim to reduce Bears Ears to just under 121,100 acres (down from nearly 1.4 million) and Grand Staircase-Escalante to 181,541 acres (down from 1.87 million). The president declared in his orders—which opponents say are unlawful—that the areas he's stripping of their monument designation contain "several resources that are vital to energy and resource independence," including silver, copper, uranium, and zinc.
The orders were met with immediate outrage from tribes, Democratic lawmakers, and conservationists. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement that the president has "illegally opened up two of the most extraordinary landscapes in America at the behest of polluting corporations who seek to ravage them for short-term profits."
"Trump has been selling out our public lands and waters since the day he took office," said Huffman, pointing to previous attacks on the monuments during the president's first White House term. "Trump tried this once before. We fought him then, and we are ready to fight him now, because no president should have the power to give away what belongs to the American people, including future generations. Keep public lands in public hands.”
Scott Braden, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said his organization "will challenge this unlawful decision in federal court" and expressed confidence that Trump's "reckless and unlawful acts will be rejected."
“Today’s action makes it clear that Utah is the epicenter of Republican efforts to dismantle and obliterate America’s system of public lands," said Braden. "President Trump’s outrageous attack on Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments was taken at the urging of Utah politicians—Sens. Mike Lee and John Curtis, Gov. Spencer Cox, and the others—who championed this action. These two landscapes deserve to be protected for current and future generations of Utahns and Americans, not opened to exploitation."
During a signing ceremony on Monday, flanked by Utah Republicans, Trump characterized his scaling back of monument protections as an effort to give land "back to the people of Utah." The president falsely claimed that people could "virtually not even walk on" the lands under the protections he targeted.
"You can’t go hunting. You can’t go fishing," the president said, incorrectly. "You can’t do anything."
Trump's proclamations cite authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which empowers the president to "reserve parcels of land as a part of the national monuments." But opponents of Trump's assault on the two Utah national monuments noted that the law does not explicitly authorize the president to scale back protections implemented by previous administrations.
In 2021, then-President Joe Biden restored protections to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante after Trump's first attempt to gut them in 2017. Trump's new assault on the two national monuments goes much further than the previous one. (The far-right Project 2025 agenda, which Trump has repeatedly tried to disavow despite his ties to its architects, called for the downsizing of national monuments and repeal of the Antiquities Act.)
"President Trump’s attack on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments is just as illegal today as it was in 2017,” Heidi McIntosh, managing attorney for Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountain Office, said in a statement on Monday. "The Antiquities Act authorizes presidents to designate national monuments, not to destroy them. Today’s proclamations are a slap to the face of public lands visitors across the country, as well as the local communities and tribes that have worked for years to protect these special places. Earthjustice and our partners are prepared to vigorously defend the monuments once again."
Autumn Gillard, coordinator for the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition, said Monday that "our tribes were not informed of or asked about this decision, and that’s unacceptable."
“Today’s action is a direct strike against the federal government’s duty to consult with tribes," said Gillard. "It also profoundly disrespects our intergenerational traditional knowledge by destroying a framework for tribal co-stewardship over our ancestral lands in which we invested years of effort. Today’s action cannot stand."
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
There were at least 3 others on the milkweed in my yard, but they've disappeared when they were very small. So, I decided to take this little one in and keep it safe until it turns into a butterfly.
Name is Munchy BTW.
Edit: look how much it munched since I took the first pic:
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/63687
It’s barely the middle of summer in the northern hemisphere, and heatwaves are once again breaking temperature records.
In the United States, dozens of cities sweltered through their hottest Fourth of July celebrations, with temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. In New Jersey alone, dozens died from the heat over the weekend. European authorities have linked thousands of deaths during the end of June to heat-related causes. And on Thursday, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that Western Europe had experienced the hottest June ever recorded in the region.
The seas are running a fever, too. It was also the hottest June on record for the world’s oceans, according to Copernicus. Nearly 40 percent of ocean area worldwide is undergoing a marine heatwave, with intense hot patches in the Mediterranean Sea and the Pacific Ocean more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than usual. It’s the latest in a wave of ocean warming that began in 2023, fueling devastating cyclones and damaging the majority of the planet’s coral reefs.
As humans burn fossil fuels, the oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by the resulting greenhouse gases, causing them to warm. Waters at the surface also exchange heat and moisture with the atmosphere, helping to drive hotter temperatures and more extreme weather. A recent study found that at least a fifth of heatwaves on land begin in the ocean.
“Heat is one of the features of climate change that has already arrived,” said Ruth Engel, a data scientist for environmental health and extreme heat with the World Resources Institute. “It’s not something we need to prepare for 25 years from now. It’s already a deadly health issue now.”
In mild climates and historically hot ones alike, extreme heat has become an expected part of summer, Engel said. Last year, more people died from extreme heat than from road crashes in Europe, she added.
Because weather, climate, and oceans are so intertwined, it can take months for scientists to pinpoint the cause of any one heat event. But there are some early clues that can help researchers connect weather events to ocean heatwaves, said Zachary Labe, a scientist at Climate Central, a research nonprofit.
For example, scientists suspect that the recent heatwaves across Europe are tied to extra-warm temperatures in the Mediterranean Sea, he said. And the high temperatures and humidity causing Floridians to crank up their air-conditioners are probably related to a marine heatwave with water temperatures near 90 degrees F off the state’s Gulf coast. Unusually warm temperatures in the Pacific Ocean may have helped set up a weather pattern driving a potentially record-breaking heatwave forecast for the central and northern U.S. in the coming week, he said.
“The current patterns that are creating these heat domes are similar to those we’ve seen before,” Labe said. “But climate change is just acting to boost everything.” Essentially, warmer global temperatures mean worse consequences when extreme weather does hit, he said.
A thermometer attached to a bus stop in the city center of Madrid reads 53 degrees Celsius, or 127 degrees Fahrenheit. Luis Soto/SOPA Images via Getty Images
Hotter air also makes the atmosphere spongier and capable of holding more water. For every 1 degree Celsius of warming, the atmosphere can hold about 7 percent more moisture. It also holds onto the water for longer. That means more time between rainfalls, and heavier, more dangerous deluges when rain does fall.
Scientists have linked climate change to heavy rainfall events such as the one that flooded Central Texas last summer. In recent days, Super Typhoon Bavi bore down on the Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific. It’s the second super typhoon with the “fingerprint of climate change” to form in the region in a handful of months.
Ocean warming is also a direct cause of sea level rise thanks to a phenomenon known as thermal expansion. As the seas warm, they expand and push further up coastlines, setting the stage for storms like Bavi to cause greater damage.
And recently, a recurring pattern of warm water known as El Niño began cycling through the Pacific, adding even more extreme weather to the equation. That’s because El Niño churns up some of the heat that the ocean absorbs, bringing it toward the surface where it interacts with the atmosphere and reshapes weather around the world. This year’s emerging event, considered a “super El Niño,” has a 81 percent chance of becoming one of the strongest in history, according to a recent forecast by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That means global average temperatures are likely to remain elevated well into early next year, said Matthew England, a professor of physical oceanography and climate science at the University of New South Wales in Australia. “The first year of an El Nino cycle tends to be on the warm side, but the records are generally broken in the second year,” he said.
Every El Niño is different, but each one comes with predictable effects that can help forecasters figure out what to expect, said Alex Sen Gupta, a professor at the Climate Change Research Center, also at the University of New South Wales.
In general, El Niño years are associated with heavier rainfall in places like California and South America and drier conditions across Australia and Southeast Asia. And although El Niño tends to suppress hurricanes near the United States, other regions tend to see stronger cyclones with more rainfall.
There isn’t evidence yet that climate change is making El Niños or La Niñas (the inverse pattern of cool water that forms in intervening years) stronger. But a hotter planet means more intense effects from both of them, Sen Gupta said. And while scientists need more years of data to say for sure, some have hypothesized that the swings between strong El Niño and La Niña years are becoming more frequent.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The oceans are full of heat, and it’s coming ashore on Jul 10, 2026.
From Grist via This RSS Feed.
Top: Florida Crown Conch
Middle: Florida Fighting Conch
Bottom: juvenile Florida Fighting Conch
found this past weekend out beachcombing. They were washed ashore empty, otherwise they'd have gotten heaved back into the water. I find remnants of conch shells pretty often but finding three whole shells in one day is rare for me.
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/12140367
It's boxing day for the brown hares of Bintree in Norfolk, captured in Sarah Darnell's 'The Fur Flew'
(Image credit: Sarah Darnell/British Wildlife Photography Awards)
Hello petal: A shower of pollen is scattered by a foraging bee illuminated in the glow of the sun in Alison Bell's highly commended 'A Kind of Magic'.
(Image credit: Alison Bell/British Wildlife Photography Awards)
A camouflaged flower crab spider blends in with the colour of the blooms in the hope of ambushing any unsuspecting bees, moths and other insects in Adam Ferry's 'Waiting on a Daisy'.
(Image credit: Adam Ferry/British Wildlife Photography Awards)
Turning heads: Cate Barrow attracts the icy stare of a short-eared owl in her 'Upside Down Owl'
(Image credit: Cate Barrow/British Wildlife Photography Awards)
More than 250 of the winning and shortlisted images are published in 'British Wildlife Photography Awards Collection 14' (£35, Graffeg Books). Entries are now open for the 2027 competition.
(Image credit: British Wildlife Photography Awards)
Trouble afoot: A plucky juvenile starling struggles to escape the clutches of a sparrowhawk in Mark Parker's 'Nemesis', winner of the Animal Behaviour category.
(Image credit: Mark Parker/British Wildlife Photography Awards)
'So glad you could come': A dew-doused azure damselfly appears to beckon the viewer through a nibbled leaf that forms Lee Frost's 'Nature's Window'.
(Image credit: Lee Frost/British Wildlife Photography Awards)
Someone to look up to: A fox cub is a study in adoration under the watchful care of its mother in Victor Soares's 'Admiration in a Fox's Eyes'.
(Image credit: Victor Soares/British Wildlife Photography Awards)
When time flies: A flurry of feathered seeds dances from the shaken head of a delicate dandelion clock as a bank vole contemplates sinking its teeth into the stem in Paul Williams's 'Zephyr'.
(Image credit: Paul Williams/British Wildlife Photography Awards)
Flyleaf: a patchwork leaf-cutter bee in Chris Jackson's 'Bringing in the Leaves', which was highly commended in the Hidden Britain category. The bees cut discs out of greenery and glue them together with saliva to build cells to house their larvae.
(Image credit: Chris Jackson/British Wildlife Photography Awards)
This tiny purple blossom is a Sea Purslane flower. About the size of a US dime.
Federally protected in the US by the Migratory Bird Act of 1918, possession of brown pelican feathers is a major no-no. Migratory Bird Act was a mostly direct response to the decimation of bird populations so ladies could have a hat adorned with feathers. The law makes zero differentiation between feathers fallen off a fully healthy, living bird as part of natural processes, and one that you acquired from shooting and killing the bird.
Brown Pelicans were nearly killed off due to DDT, until it was outlawed. Since DDT bioaccumulates in their food web, the pelicans were laying eggs with shells so thin due to DDT that just during the process of incubation the parents would invariably crush their eggs. The banning of DDT allowed the bird to be removed from the Endangered Species List in 2009.
I think Brown Pelicans might be my favorite bird.
Sea Whip coral. Looks a lot like some wire or some such trash washed up on shore. Also in photo, white things are tube worm casings that have calcified, and some coquina clam shells.
Here we see chinese spring water, Ganten, in its natural environment - a beach in south Texas. Nature provides.
A couple of the maybe two dozen Lettered Olive Snail shells I found today.
Lettered Olive Snails are carnivorous. They spend their time mostly burrowing through the sand looking for bivalves, worms, clams, other snails, etc. They use their foot for tunneling just under the surface of the sand. When they find a clam they sort of surround the clam and suffocate it. When the shell opens because the animal dies, the snail takes advantage.
I don't find many of these, but like most shells I just toss them back after I get a few photos. The smaller hermit crabs like the Thinstripe and Longwrist use these smaller shells so I usually leave them on the beach.
