@therealqueenk / therealqueenk.tumblr.com
Dear god please let housing become affordable here and please make this force the thousands of sitting-duck properties re-enter the market at drastically reduced prices for native families to be able to purchase and then live in their homeland 😭 kū kia‘i ‘āina
Take the memory, leave the shell! Watch what happens when we return seashells to the beach & marine hermit crabs!
Seashells are so important to beaches for a whole host of reasons.
🐚Over-shelling can affect hermit crabs because it reduces the availability of suitable shells for them to inhabit. Hermit crabs rely on empty shells of other creatures for protection and shelter. When there are too few shells available, hermit crabs may be forced to inhabit inadequate shells & pollution as homes, which can hinder their growth and make them more vulnerable to predators and environmental stressors. This can ultimately impact their survival and reproductive success.
🐚Shells provide homes or attachment surfaces for algae, sea grass, sponges, coral and a host of other microorganisms.
🐚Animals such as decorator crabs and octopus use shells as camouflage and many fish use shells as hiding places to avoid predators.
🐚Shells help to stabilize beaches and anchor seagrass.
🐚Shells are used by shorebirds to build nests.
🐚When shells break down, they provide nutrients for the organisms living in the sand or for those that build their own shells. (Shells are a major source of calcium.) I’m a firm believer in when we know better, we do better. I once shelled, and then when I learned all of this, I returned all shells that were not sprayed with a clear varnish to the beach & watched the marine hermit crabs go wild changing shells that were so needed!
oops! it seems i tripped and dropped several million free books, papers, and other resources
https://annas-archive.org
https://sci-hub.se
https://z-lib.is
https://libgen.is
https://libgen.rs
https://www.pdfdrive.com
https://library.memoryoftheworld.org
https://monoskop.org/Monoskop
https://libcom.org
https://libretexts.org
http://classics.mit.edu
https://librivox.org
https://standardebooks.org
https://www.gutenberg.org
https://core.ac.uk
Philadelphia, and specifically a Black neighborhood and community.
Finding Ceremony is a descendant community-controlled process, restoring the lineages of care, reverence and spiritual memory to the work of caring for our dead. The formation of Finding Ceremony stems from aAliy Muhammad’s and Dr. Lyra Monteiro’s observation and study of the Penn Museum’s negligence stretching back decades, not only with the Morton Cranial Collection, but also with regard to the MOVE remains, and the other estimated 12,000 individuals held in the basement of the museum to this day.
more fucking petitions because this clown car country cannot stop with the bigotry for 30 seconds
uk people it takes 5 seconds and you checking your email to verify
everyone else: rebloge please
As of Sunday 12th May, this petition is at 1,897 signatures.
At 10,000 signatures, government will respond to this petition
At 100,000 signatures, this petition will be considered for debate in Parliament”
Spiders? Hate them but see their use. Mosquitoes? Begrudgingly acknowledge that they like... feed bats. But can anyone explain what the fuck ticks are doing that's helpful??? Because frankly I'm not convinced they're doing anything nice for anyone
ticks are a massive source of protein for the many many creatures that eat them, same as mosquitos. they're integral to the food chain.
also, parasites of all kinds are incredibly important to ecosystems for many reasons: they help keep populations- especially of large herbivores and predators- low and healthy, they help individuals develop immune strength, and they are often integral parts of their food webs.
much of life is parasitic. it's a very successful life-plan and food strategy. dont hold it against them: blood is a really nutritious food and the creatures they target (generally) have a lot of it. it's not their 'fault' they have the capacity to carry even smaller parasites/diseases. that's just how life is
Deer is big creature, has microbe community inside it making it super good at digesting plant, turning plant into easy nutrients.
Small creatures would like nutrients. Deer is too big to eat, hoards all the nutrients. RUDE! Not everybody can be a wolf! Not fair :(
Tick bites deer. Tick takes tiny bit of deer's blood, falls off deer. Tick now contains deer's nutrients
Small creature eats tick. Nutrients in deer go into small creatures.
In this way, deer can become food for spiders, birds, lizards, beetles, ants. It couldn't happen without ticks. They are the portable snack packs of the forest
What about fleas? I hate those little bugs
I think there's nothing wrong with being disgusted by parasites, it's just an instinct that evolved to stop little guys from taking all your nutrients.
And infectious diseases spread really easily by contact with blood, so the snack packs of the forest are also like public transportation systems for blood-borne pathogens.
But outside of your very understandable desire as an organism to keep your blood inside and pathogens outside, parasites are an amazing and thought provoking aspect of life's diversity.
Wild animals can have dozens of different species of worms and arthropods living on or in them. (Most big animal species even have their own parasites that can only live on that animal.) To the parasite, animals are worlds; a deer is like a planet inhabited by its own fauna, just like deer inhabit the landscape.
Isn't it awe-inspiring that you can go into a habitat and see animals inhabiting it, but each animal IS a habitat with its own animals...
And it keeps going! Parasites often have their own parasites, called hyper-parasites! And hyper-parasites can have hyper-parasites! How many layers of animal are there?!?
Parasites are symbiotic creatures that decrease the fitness of their partner, but "parasite=harmful" is not quite right, since parasitism interlocks the fates of organisms in complex ways. Sometimes a parasite has to spend the first part of its life cycle in one animal, and the second part in another totally different animal. How do they get there? Maybe the second animal eats the first one. The parasite needs this predator-prey interaction to happen to continue life! If the predator turns to other prey, the parasite can't live. But if the predator loses its other prey and has nothing to eat except that prey, well that might seem like a good thing except now there are 27 of you in the same predator's digestive tract, and the predator is now weak and struggles to hunt. If your host starves, you are all dead for certain!
Parasites in a situation with two hosts, one predator the other prey, sometimes might change the prey's behavior to make it easier for the predator to catch. This might be considered helping the predator. Is the parasite "harming" the predator or just taking a cut of the profits when it makes a kill? It's complicated!
Another way to do it is to be a parasite that lives inside a parasite that lives on the outside of an animal, and when the animal grooms itself and bites the ectoparasite out of its fur, the parasite living inside the parasite can now grow inside the host animal.
Parasites' impact on their hosts' behaviors impacts the whole environment! For example maybe a herd of deer likes to browse on the tender shoots down in the swamp, but they do not like the swarms of mosquitoes. By driving off the deer, the mosquitoes help the orchids in the swamp survive. If a bison wallows in the dirt to get rid of parasites, it creates a disturbance that gives rise to a little mini habitat for flowers that can't survive in the tall, less disturbed grass. If parasites make it unhealthy for animals to live crammed in a small area, they might be driven to disperse and move to new habitats, or to have a system of migrating from place to place. If a large animal is itchy and scratches itself against a tree and rubs the bark off, that might kill the tree, which is bad for the tree but great for the woodpeckers that need standing deadwood to hunt for food.
Speaking of woodpeckers, we have recently learned that woodpeckers transmit lichens and mosses to new places! And woodpeckers also were found to harbor freshwater diatoms...which should be found in freshwater streams, but perhaps got onto the bird when it was taking a bath...why does a bird take a bath? Perhaps to get rid of parasites...?
...Basically, everything is so interconnected that a flea could affect an unimaginable number of things. Parasites weave together the ecosystem in ways we barely understand.
Of course, you should still treat your dog or cat for fleas...but that's part of your symbiosis with the dog or cat, so even the space where a flea should be, is a space where organisms are bound together.
AMAZING POST— rbing to add a fun source!
These researchers essentially argue that parasites are the “invisible” stability in our food webs— that parasites when modeled over a normal trophic pyramid will form an almost upside down pyramid!!
This is one of their figures (based on a California salt marsh study looking at parasites based on trophic level of the host) and shows the interconnection of an ordinary macroorganism food web (red) overlayed with parasites (yellow)!
“Homage to Linneas: how many parasites, how many hosts?” (Dobson et al. 2008)
CA Marsh experiment specifically: “Parasites dominate food web links” (Lafferty et al. 2006)
WOAG
@bogleech parasite appreciation post!!!
A lot of this was also proposed by Carl Zimmer in a book back in the late 90s, which I just discovered is free online!!
https://archive.org/details/parasite-rex-by-carl-zimmer
Listen Up Columbia! — Portraits from a campus in crisis Photographed by Gabriella Gregor Splaver
hey! you shouldnt make jokes calling cis people eggs, especially when they are real living breathing human beings with intelligent thought and critical thinking. if you do, you're weird and i think you should consider the effect your words more often, because as someone who was a very public facing cis person who had a lot of Egg jokes made about me before transitioning, it still makes me fucking sick to think about. it fucked me up so bad that i refused to transition until i quit my job and wasnt under the eyes of people making bets on my psychology. how dare you fucking speak down to me regarding my own identity. how dare you fucking claim to know me better than i know myself.
it is not the privilege of trans people to have their stated gender identity believed, nor is it a sin of cis people to acknowledge their option to transition and still remain cis. make egg jokes about fictional characters, fine. but accusing a stranger of not being the gender they claim to be is not something you get to reclaim when you're trans.
and no, i don't feel better about these jokes now that im out. you dont get to say "i knew it". that is the same exact thing, just played out retroactively.
WAIT I JUST FIGURED OUT WHY A FEW PEOPLE GOT SO MAD
you heard me say "don't make egg jokes to people who arent out" (a very specific direct action) and decided i meant "don't ever try to help your friends who might be struggling with their gender identity" (a very broad passive action).
damn. damn it is really sad that you want me to be wrong that bad. that you decided that's what i said.
“Why should rich people pay more” because fuck ‘em
“So you are okay for paying more when you have money” I am not excluded from ‘fuck ‘em’ when relevant
“I am not excluded from ‘fuck ‘‘em’ when relevant” is surprisingly powerful as both a statement and philosophy
BIG SILLY?
this is actually the coolest thing i've heard in a minute. there's something really reassuring about it, honestly. that there's a place in nature, carved out by these creatures, and that even with hundreds of years of separation, they slot back into these spots where they're meant to be
there’s such an unbelievable multitude of this type of (straight) woman who’s like “when he mentions a ‘she’ 😡🥺👀” “when he calls some girl his ‘friend’ 👀👀🔪” etc and this person is like a different species to me. this person is a space alien. this type of person makes me feel like amy adams in arrival
a man’s female friends are like a car’s warranty. a woman has vouched for this guy’s ability to be normal. you should be kissing her on the mouth for her service
Also your girlfriend not letting you have female friends is no less controlling and abusive than if it was the other way around. If you have a girlfriend who does this, this is your sign to get out.
As much as tumblr likes to post about boypussy some people on here get really mad when you ask them to respect the men who have pussies.
Yeah yeah okay this anime boy has a cunt and can get boypreggers . Now are you normal when real life trans men are at the obgyn to get reproductive health care ?
Youtube doing this while fully fucking enabling the alt right pipeline with dozens if not hundreds of racist/anti semitic grifters on their platform for well over a decade at this point is an insane double standard.
libsoftiktok going after a beloved inventor furry for some reason
if you're wearing a fitbit, you're using spottacus's technology. be grateful.
oh boy
for further context, spottacus is not a professor at berkeley. Furries at Berkeley (a university-recognized RSO) asked him to give the first talk in their masterclass series, which you can find here!
he talks about his own experience with neurodivergence, his STEM career, the furry fandom, and how all three overlap. a really really interesting (and important!) video
hes also specifically a sabertooth lion in this video (and WOW what a gorgeous fursuit it is)
tried my best
