Sustainable till death do us part, and 45 days beyond; mushroom coffin a last best wish for some
And while traditional wooden coffins come from trees that can take decades to grow and years to break down in the soil, the mushroom versions biodegrades and delivers the remains to nature in barely a month and a half
Fly fact of the day: Some adult flies produce silk.
Silk is a very common protein fiber to produce, shared by a lot of arthropods, so I'm not so surprised when I learn of another insect that can produce it.
But still, it's pretty cool.
Some male flies in family Empidae wrap gifts for females in silk produced in their legs.
The more you know! #insects#entomology#flies#ecology#silk
Aaaah my main PhD paper has just been published! 🥳
Wild carrion crows in London and Milton Keynes listen and respond to speech out of their own motivation, but unlike the crows in Tokyo they didn't respond more to the foreign language than the local language 🐦
in theory, extractive industries clean up when they're done with a particular place. in practice, when they're done sucking up the resources, they abandon equipment & leave poison ponds & huge dangerous holes in the ground.
they just abandon it!! and if you want it to not be a poison hole forever, usually it's the gov that pays. IF someone pushes VERY hard for it, for many years, usually with lawsuits.
Climate change is here, but your child likely isn't learning much about it at school
More than half of adults see climate change as a major threat to the country’s well-being, but most states don’t require children to learn about it in school.
New Jersey, Oregon, Connecticut and California feature climate topics or environmental education in their curriculum, but that isn’t the norm
Happy #BiodiversityDay! From our archives, Mrunali Sundar speaks to Bangalureans who are passionate about opening their children's eyes to the blossoming biodiversity in the city and beyond:
#ForestForensics: do you know this #plant? it's growing in a tropical wet climate on hawai'i island. (hawai'i people & other people in the pacific probably know.)
Loved seeing this last night - bats on the radar as they head out for their evening meals. How many circles of bats emerging can you count? (Attachment is a video of weather radar of the #CentralTexas area, showing many expanding circles around areas where bats roost during the day.) #Texas#Austin#bats#radar#nature#ecology
It's #WorldBeeDay! I love bees, especially bumble bees. I worked for a beekeeper for one full year, so I got to do every seasonal activity of beekeeping. Each time I witnessed bees emerging from the hive, I cheered them on: "Go bees, go!"
Yes, I am a nerd for nature.
Stop using pesticides and rip out that environmental abomination you call a lawn. This photo of a Vosnesensky Bumble bee is from my lawn-free yard.
Here’s one of my prints, one of a series of related prints about leaf cutter bees, each unique. These prints are both about, and a sort of collaboration with leaf cutter bees! These small, but multifarious native bees are important pollinators, who make nests for their babies using small telltale half-moon pieces they cut from leaves and petals.
I just learned about #what3words - a 3-metre square grid system that uses a 3 word address to easily and memorably #communicate precise location information globally. Very helpful for #fieldwork in remote locations and #safety plans. The words are random, but coincidentally, the door to the building where our #wetland#ecology lab is based is at ///indoor.roaming.aquatic !
Is there an #Urban#Ecology community on the fediverse? I have some questions about accumulated leaf litter in the street gutter and potential uses, contaminants to consider. #UrbanEcology
A new study looks back into history to assess human impacts on the habitat of Asian #elephants and finds sharp declines starting several centuries ago.
Habitat loss has increasingly driven Asian elephants, like these foraging at a garbage dump in Sri Lanka, into human areas.
The "I went to a #Math/#Ecology conference in Southern #France and all I got is tons of super nice #nature pictures and now everybody thinks I took a vacation there" starter pack:
🥀 #Ophrys cf. fusca (awesome wild #orchid!), 🐛 #Scolopendra cingulata (HUGE #centipede), ☀️ sunny view fom a trail alongside the #Calanques, 🧗 sunny view of me before climbing down that rock.
learning about how the highly-invasive strawberry guava (psidium cattleianum, also called waiawi) got introduced to the hawaiian islands and the story is just as bad as one would expect...