Earth

This photograph series by Mark Cowan documents a phenomenon called 'lachryphagy' ("tear-feeding"). The caiman excretes salt in their tears & the butterflies need the precious minerals for their metabolism & reproduction.

So, they're feeding on crocodilian tears.

(📷: Mark Cowan, Curtin Uni.)

https://bsky.app/profile/c0nc0rdance.bsky.social/post/3lunfcndhfs2e

So, I've won you nerds over on weevils, but can I make you love spiders?!

In this video we return to West Oakland, California to inspect the illegally-planted (but eventually authorized by the city) garden on Mandela Parkway, giving it a full species survey of rarities that were planted there including the Big Cone Pinion Pine, Pinus maximartinezii, as well as the inglorious Puya x berteroniana, Agave vilmoriniana (Octopus Agave), Quercus rugosa (Mexican net leaf oak) and many more.

We also check out some of the trees planted on side streets, including dawn redwoods, giant sequoias, and coast redwoods

[suburbia]

A new peer-reviewed scientific study suggests logging practices in Ontario are unsustainable and out of line with the province’s own strategy for sustainably managing forests.

It’s no surprise to David Flood, a registered professional forester, who has long thought Ontario was permitting too many trees to be cut down.

Flood is from Matachewan First Nation in northeastern Ontario, home to much of the province’s boreal forest. There, Flood’s community has watched as forests became smaller and more sparse over time, threatening the natural habitat for caribou and martens, two species that rely on mature forests for their habitat.

Flood is the general manager for Wahkohtowin Development, a decade-old social enterprise held by three First Nations — Chapleau Cree, Missanabie Cree and Brunswick House — to strengthen Indigenous participation in forest and land management across their territories.

“We’ve felt for a long time that there is overconsumption going on,” Flood said in an interview with The Narwhal.

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Halmus chalybeus, commonly known as the steelblue ladybird, is a species of ladybird in the beetle family Coccinellidae and the genus Halmus that is native to Australia.

Sunday gave me some of my absolute favorite creatures, including this sweet derpy long Synemosyna petrunkevitchi lass. Her face is all 👀

Watch the moment curlew frightens a hare which wandered too close to its nest

This region of Colorado, maybe an hour's drive from where this was taken, is where Chronic Wasting Disease was first detected. Our Cervidae species naturally change their elevation based on seasonal habitat availability. They go into the Rockies during high summer when they can forage without snow and retreat to the front range when it's too cold to survive any higher.

The front range was immediately colonised by cattle ranchers and farmers. The ecocide of the bison degraded that land on top of industrial agriculture's impact, as their foraging patterns are different. Between fencing, irresponsible hunting, calorie loss, wildfire/water policy, and the urban development of the front range/foothills the Cervidae were concentrated in the least desirable pieces of high elevation land. Their most genetically healthy were killed for trophies while the isolated breeding pools created what will be dementia covid at some point. CWD is the most horrifying disease I know of and it comes from denying habitat.

I like that this city-managed natural area manages to balance habitat with accessible low-impact hiking. It has a tremendous number of birds and insects. The native grasses are healthy despite recent heatwaves, so the deer and elk can actually seasonally migrate to quality grazing land. It was full of currants and dozens of our 946 native bee species and dead trees pockmarked by woodpeckers. If we had just done this from the start, the world would have been spared The Big One.

One of my favourite native wildflowers, Cleomella serrulata. I saw a few dozen of them today that were covered in a mixture of native bees, wasps, ants, and beetles. There was a really healthy and diverse bird population in that natural area as a result of the robust insect populations and fruiting shrubs.

It's owlfly larva.

Rescue crews are scrambling to find survivors of catastrophic flooding that tore through Central Texas on the Fourth of July. It’s already one of the deadliest flood events in modern American history, leaving at least 95 people dead, 27 of whom were girls and counselors at a Christian summer camp in Kerr County, which was inundated when the nearby Guadalupe River surged 26 feet in just 45 minutes.

“It’s the worst-case scenario for a very extreme, very sudden, literal wall of water,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, during a livestream Monday morning. “I don’t think that’s an exaggeration in this case, based on the eyewitness accounts and the science involved.”

It will take some time for scientists to do proper “attribution” studies here, to say for instance how much extra rain they can blame on climate change. But generally speaking, this disaster has climate change’s marks all over it — a perfect storm of conspiring phenomena, both in the atmosphere and on the ground. “To people who are still skeptical that the climate crisis is real, there’s such a clear signal and fingerprint of climate change in this type of event,” said Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

This tragedy actually started hundreds of miles to the southeast, out at sea. As the planet has warmed, the gulf has gotten several degrees Fahrenheit hotter. That’s turned it into a giant puddle of fuel for hurricanes barreling toward the Gulf Coast, since those storms feed on warm seawater.

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