yee

I play pot of weed and end my turn

pot of weed allows me to drag two blunts

Okay. So. You know how some people want to finish exterminating all large predatory mammals so they have less competition for deer and so they don't occasionally lose livestock? And you know how native deer species in North America have been hit increasingly hard with Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in the past couple of decades due to overpopulation thanks to the eradication of large predatory mammals that normally keep them in check?

We already have evidence that reintroducing predatory mammals to their native ranges not only knocks deer populations back to a healthier level, and now we've discovered that apparently the digestive systems of cougars and bobcats are lethal to CWD prions. Prions are among the most difficult pathogens* to eliminate; you have to heat them up to about 1,800 degrees F in order to thoroughly destroy them. And prion diseases like CWD are almost universally fatal.

So to find that these wild cats can safely eat CWD-infected animals AND significantly reduce the chances that the prions will be spread to other deer is a pretty big deal, especially since some other animals like coyotes and crows do pass prions undamaged through their digestive systems. And it's just one more example of why an ecosystem needs all of the species that have evolved in it over thousands of years, not just those are convenient for humans to have around. The spread of CWD is directly related to the overpopulation of deer, and it's likely that continuing to reintroduce large predatory mammals to their native range will help quell this awful prion disease.

Me, every day between 4:37pm and 7:51pm:

Hedi Xandt 

Cold weather enjoyer FREAKS when they’re shivering and tensed up and can’t feel their toes and their face hurts and

think it's a deep consolation to know that spiders dream, that monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead. that there isn't their life and our life. nor your life and my life. that it's just one teetering and endless thread and all of us, all of us, are entangled w it as deep as entanglement goes. v neat i think.

[Image description: a (bluesky?) post from colinbroadmoor @/saikohistory reading: "The concept of the 'mass audience' has had a largely deletrious influence on art. Creat art for at most 30 sickos at a time." End description.]

"Do you ever dream of land?" The whale asks the tuna.

"No." Says the tuna, "Do you?"

"I have never seen it." Says the whale, "but deep in my body, I remember it."

"Why do you care," says the tuna, "if you will never see it."

"There are bones in my body built to walk through the forests and the mountains." Says the whale.

"They will disappear." Says the tuna, "one day, your body will forget the forests and the mountains."

"Maybe I don't want to forget," Says the whale, "The forests were once my home."

"I have seen the forests." Whispers the salmon, almost to itself.

"Tell me what you have seen," says the whale.

"The forests spawned me." Says the salmon. "They sent me to the ocean to grow. When I am fat with the bounty of the ocean, I will bring it home."

"Why would the forests seek the bounty of the oceans?" Asks the whale. "They have bounty of their own."

"You forget," says the salmon, "That the oceans were once their home."

i'm listening to gathering moss, by robin wall kimmerer, and she is talking about a very odd job she was consigned to do, where an eccentric millionaire recuited her to consult on a "habitat restoration". when she arrives, the job they actually want her to do is to tell them how to plant mosses on the rocks in his garden. he wants it to look like a specific, beautiful wild cliff in the woods nearby, with centuries-old beds of moss growing thick and strong. she tells him it is impossible. such a thing would take decades to accomplish.

later, she is called back to look at the progress of the moss garden and is amazed by the thick, well-established mosses. how did they do it? she asks.

then they take her out to the woods and show her that they have been blasting huge chunks of rock out of the cliff, packaging them in burlap, and moving them to the owner's garden.

This quote really got me: "The owner is a man who loves mosses, and the exercise of power. I have no doubts of his sincerity in wishing to protect them from harm, once they conformed to his landscape design.  But I think you cannot own a thing and love it at the same time. Owning diminishes the sovreignty of a thing, enriching the possessor and diminishing the possessed. If he truly loved mosses more than control, he would have left them alone, and walked each day to see them."

- Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer 

I've talked about this before, but moss is very chronically overharvested. It grows slow (in terms of ground cover, it can take decades for a 4 foot diameter tree living mat to recover to even half the size) and it is used in a TON more things than you'd think. From trendy home dye projects on etsy, to bouquet filler, to perfumes and scents, to potting soil, to diorama/craft/cosplay items, mosses and lichens are used in a massive quantity of hobbies and merchandise. The peat moss industry in particular is directly harmful towards global warming, given that massive swaths of peat bogs are over harvested which allows millions of years of carbon gas in the ground to escape. This is a very serious and very overlooked issue, mosses and lichens are very important ecosystem engineers and keystone species that largely have no conservation followings because they're not really... Seen at all given their size and odd reproductive strategies

Please keep mosses and lichens in your thoughts and keep their best interests in your actions, these are beautiful and hardly understood little creatures that deserve our support

Photo de saname777 sur flickr via Pinterest

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