Butterfly Blues

Edible Landscaping - The Scoop on Poop

One species using the feces of another species to meet its own caloric needs?! Weird. Humans would never do that. 🙃

a crab is surrounded by sparkles and the word shiny is on the bottom ALT: a crab is surrounded by sparkles and the word shiny is on the bottom

"I was a drab little crab once..."

Garden art frog sculpture, with an inch of new snow on it

South central Michigan. Our first snow of the season.

I looked at the radar. Impressive pull of precipitation along the entire curve of your long axis, with a bit of help from Lakes Huron and Superior.

For some us, we carried paper books everywhere to avoid boredom and avoid social interaction. Same role as phones, but with one app of editor-vetted, single author (usually) very long form writing. Main frustration was that unlike phones, books were slightly but consistently oversized for pockets.

Just because...

I had no idea that "possible" and "flagrant" were synonyms

Making your own weather?! Nice!!

Japan’s military is on the ground facing a new challenge: bears | CNN When Japanese soldiers arrived in the northern prefecture of Akita on Thursday, they prepared to face a new kind of threat – one with fuzzy ears and up to 220 pounds of mass.

Another unsung and largely unappreciated government service: wildlife management.

Interesting that the situation is so out of hand in northern Japan that they needed to mobilize the military.

Enshitification by Cory Doctorow and Scale by Geoffrey West

Citizen Scientists Are Accelerating Ecology Research, Study Suggests

I had dinner with a colleague from @inaturalist.bsky.social yesterday and Jeanne shared that their users are discovering an average of one brand-new-previously-unknown-to-science species EACH MONTH!

A4. Schoodic Peninsula at Acadia National Park. There are all sorts of cool hidden spots for those adventurous enough to leave thier car.

There's not a better all around EV for the money, and unlike most of the competitors, charges way faster, is more efficient than most, and made in the U.S. with massively more U.S./CAN parts content!! And it's freaking amazing.

I took advantage of this lease deal back in June. I love it. Absolutely the best. It is quiet, smooth, crazy fast acceleration, fantastic speakers, and I have charged it almost entirely with a standard outlet in my garage, although I did take three road trips with no problem.

For any unfamiliar with the quality of journalism at Teen Vogue, it's well known for hard-hitting stories on "politically sensitive" topics including climate.

Then there's CBS: the only major network to increase climate coverage in the last few years. They just axed nearly their whole climate team.

An infographic showing the progression from underlying causes to environmental impacts across terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems. The diagram flows left to right through three main sections: "UNDERLYING CAUSES" lists three core issues: Disconnection from and domination over nature and people Concentration of power and wealth Prioritization of short-term, individual and material gains "INDIRECT DRIVERS" includes four categories: Demographic and sociocultural Economic and technological Institutions and governance Conflicts and epidemics "DIRECT DRIVERS" shows relative impact percentages across terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments, represented by horizontal bars with color-coded segments for: Land/sea use change (purple) Direct exploitation (light purple) Climate change (yellow) Pollution (gray) Invasive alien species (orange) Others (light gray) The right side features a circular illustration divided into terrestrial, freshwater, and marine zones with representative wildlife silhouettes.

🌏 Biodiversity loss has deep-rooted causes—from power imbalances to short-term priorities. These shape indirect & direct drivers like land/sea use change, exploitation & climate change.

Graphic from the IPBES #TransformativeChange Assessment ⤵️

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

That brings me back. A friend of my grandpa built a plane in my grandpa's old quanset barn. It came together slowly over many years as I was growing up.

Final version now available #AmJBot @botsocamerica.bsky.social

Sequoia & Sequoiadendron: Two paleoendemic megatrees with different adaptive responses to high-severity fires
bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Plants are not adapted to fire, but to fire regimes
🧪🌍🔥🌳🌿🪴 #ecoevo #wildfire

YouTube video by TED-Ed The beautiful math of coral - Margaret Wertheim

Hyperbolic geometry crochet, you ask? youtu.be/soxS8VtMi9E?...

A blue and pink frilly coral ish shaped knitted thing

This is my first ever creation using crochet. Taught myself this week while recovering from minor surgery. Tied it off this morning. It is a coral aka hyperbolic geometric surface.

Full Speed to a Crash Landing by Beth Nevis for fiction. Enshitification by Cory Doctorow for nonfiction.

Yes. 100%. The sci-fi time travel book To Say Nothing of the Dog (Connie Willis) is also a fun book, inspired by The Men in a Boat

Here are my three truths about climate:
1. We fail if we don’t end free-to-pollute fossil fuel model. Period. Game over.
2. A crash looms, prefigured by collapse in home insurance/mortgage markets.
3. There are true villains in the story, and we have to tell it that way.

I love anything jumping spiders, cephalapod (🐙), or slime mold related. So this whole series was an absolute delight!

Agreed. To connection, I would add autonomy (wildness). I might word it: relationships, wildness, amount, and diversity.

Have you gained any extremists or milquetoasters?

A study by I. R. Onley, P. Cassey, & M. A. McGeoch shows that biodiversity data sharing platforms are key to managing biological invasions. Closing the "knowing-doing" gap can create better conservation outcomes. 🌍

Read the full article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10531-025-03058-1

Alt National Park Service did a detailed thread on this. Aside from that, I have not seen anything fact-based on this illegal defacing and vandalism of one of America's cultural monuments from a media outlet.