earth

Transporting desert bighorn sheep with a Hughes 369D.

Nitter

Carbon credits were a scam all along!

I think what makes it even funnier is that they didn't buy it. They made it themselves via 3D printing.

Wyze cam v2 bird feeder : wyzecam

Goddamn swamps are beautiful. The only place I've been to which felt more alive is deep jungle in Panama. Driving to Miami, I stopped in Big Cypress before the Shark Valley area of the Everglades. Whereas the latter is mostly sawgrass marshes with islands of trees that are a few inches higher in elevation, Big Cypress has extensive cypress swamps that took me an hour and a half to drive through. The life there grows in layers and everything has a rich network of epiphytes growing on it. I couldn't ID the specific air plants but they're so large that I think they're the endangered giant ones. Similar species grew over almost every other tree, some of them as massive as witches brooms.

Surprisingly not as many vines as I thought there would be, but the climbing asters that dominated the area were probably 10m long and coming off a bush as large as a car.

I'm definitely going back to Florida to explore its ecosystems more and kayak around the tip. Both carnivorous plants and live fungi were totally absent that far south.

archive.today • Freakishly Smart Falcons Run These Islands - The New York Times

The success of wild striated caracaras in a test suggests that the intellects of more bird species may be underestimated.

If you heard there were faraway islands full of hyperintelligent birds, you would be forgiven for assuming that they must be parrots or crows — the superstars of the brainy bird world. But travel to the Falkland Islands near the Argentine coast, and you’ll find not parrots or crows but freakishly smart falcons called striated caracaras.

KREB

Called the Pa-Hay-Okee or River of Grass by the local Seminole tribe. It's 97km/60mi wide and flows so slowly that I couldn't see the water moving, draining Florida's main lake into the state's southern coast. Ecologically it's fascinating, with like 4m/12ft of elevation gain across it representing multiple ecosystems linked to how much water persists throughout the year. In the Rockies the ecosystems change every 300m/1000ft, here it's whether the water is at your ankle or your knee.

Highly recommended. It's remarkable.

Creature Feature: Helmet jellyfish

About Helmet jellyfish

If you’ve never seen a helmet jellyfish in real life, you’re in good company: it’s one of the few jellyfish (to be accurate, cnidaria) that spends most of its life in the ocean twilight zone. Due to their photo-sensitive red pigment, helmet jellies avoid sunlight like the plague, preferring the frigid depths to the sun’s damaging rays. That red pigment is nonetheless useful for warning would-be predators— and also disguising the bioluminescent prey in their bellies. Like their Coronate cousins, the Atolla jellyfish, helmet jellies display bluish-green lights along a prominently grooved “crown”, a further warning to fish and sea turtles to stay away.

Unlike other jellyfish, these red-helmet types hatch straight from the egg to juvenile stage. They hang out in all oceans except for the Arctic, but could be shifting their range northward. In recent years, the species has proliferated in Norwegian fjords as far north as Svalbard, causing some alarm amongst fishermen who feared that these glowing nightly apparitions on the surface would eat up all the juvenile cod and haddock. This unwelcome guest has nonetheless provided scientists with an opportunity to study helmet jellyfish’s habits, which previously could only take place at depth.

Helmet jellyfish lack brains and eyes, but make use of a simple sensory “bulb” that detects changes in light. When the sun comes out, that’s the helmet jellyfish’s cue to retreat to the murky safety of the twilight zone. However, scientists have been puzzled by the lack of day-night pattern that most other diel vertical migrators follow. They point to the gradual “darkening” of coastal waters due to nutrient runoff as one reason the helmet jelly might be able to survive the light of day.

In uphappy news - Researchers approximated the dangers of deep-sea mining by pumping sediment into the tanks of helmet jellyfish to see how the animals would cope with muddy water. The results were bad. - Hexbear

Oil execs hanging.

Dragonflies are, bar none, the most agile and skilled fliers in the animal kingdom. No other animal can fly forward with great speed, hover and turn in place, and most impressive of all, fly backwards. The muscles that control their wings are like pistons, incredibly strong, and they can independently control the angle of each wing. Their flight patterns are being heavily studied for use in designing drones, and were the explicit inspiration for the animation of the ornithopter wings in the new Dune adaptation.

Dragonfly nymphs spend their larval years underwater. And yes, I do mean years. They spend most of their lives in this juvenile, aquatic state, up to five years in some species, hunting mosquito larva, tadpoles, even small fish as they grow. They don't undergo a true metamorphosis; they moult, shedding their exoskeletons to grow, and eventually reach a point where they climb up out of the water onto a plant well above the surface, and moult one last time. Still clinging to their exuvia (shed exoskeleton) the imago pumps their wings full of heamolymph (bug blood) for the first and last time, spreading them out into the gloriously agile appendages that will carry them through their brief adulthood.

Adults will anywhere from a week to six months on average before they die, depending on species. They have incredible eyesight as well. Those gigantic peepers can see in nearly 360 degrees above and below it. And they see with precision. It used to be thought that insects had poor vision with their compound eyes; more recently it's been found by rapidly making each photoreceptor at the end of each lens go in and out of focus they can assemble a very sharp picture of the world, much as we put together a complete picture of our surroundings from constructed memory of all the spots that aren't the tiny area our pupils can actively focus on. The end result is that these guys can see pretty much everything happening around them in great detail, which they combine with their incredible flight abilities to snatch up and eat their prey directly out of the air.

Dragonflies can be fiercely territorial, protecting the best spots for finding mates and laying eggs. When it does come time to lay eggs, they usually lay them on plants that are directly on or even under water. The nymphs will hatch and start preying on whatever they can find and the whole thing starts again.

Dragonflies are beautiful creatures and it's mesmerizing to watch them fly. Keep an eye out if you're ever near a body of water. They're probably there, being magnificent.