earth

https://makerichpolluterspay.org/climate-equality-report/

Pictured above: A Blue Banded Bee gets ready to sleep for the night by clasping onto a suitable stalk with its jaws

Blue Banded Bees are amongst our most beautiful Australian native bees. They are about 11 mm long and have bands of metallic blue fur across their black abdomens.

Blue Banded Bees are solitary bees. This means that each female bee mates and then builds a solitary nest by herself. She builds her nest in a shallow burrow in clay soil or sometimes in mudbricks. Many Blue Banded Bees may build their nest burrows in the same spot, close to one another, like neighbouring houses in a village.

Blue Banded Bees can perform a special type of pollination called 'buzz pollination'. Some flowers hide their pollen inside tiny capsules. A Blue Banded Bee can grasp a flower of this type and shiver her flight muscles, causing the pollen to shoot out of the capsule. She can then collect the pollen for her nest and carry it from flower to flower, pollinating the flowers. Quite a few of our native Australian flowers require buzz pollination eg Hibbertia, Senna.

Tomato flowers are also pollinated better when visited by a buzz pollinating bee. Researchers at the University of Adelaide made substantial progress in developing native Blue Banded Bees for greenhouse tomato pollination.

It would be much better for our environment to use our native Blue Banded Bees for this purpose rather than introducing European Bumblebees to Australia! (European Bumble Bees are not found on mainland Australia. Instead, native Blue Banded Bees and Carpenter Bees fill the niche of buzz pollinators on the mainland.)

Source: https://www.aussiebee.com.au/blue-banded-bee-information.html

and he said yes that's what we call them

Parrots are known for being adaptable, but you might not expect to see them in the trees of snowy Stuttgart. Yet it’s true: Around 50 yellow-headed Amazon parrots live in this German city. And they don’t just survive here – they thrive.

From making the most of the daily commute to major success in breeding, the Stuttgart parrots are of great interest to conservationists. With wild parrot numbers in sharp decline and more cities across the globe reporting urban parrot populations, could they offer hope for their species’ future?

Southwestern Speckled Rattlesnake (Crotalus pyrrhus) | Flickr

The Southwestern Speckled Rattlesnake exhibits great variability throughout their range. Their coloration generally matches the tones of the rocks found within their habitat. This, the white variant, lives in an area where the granite is light in coloration with dark flecking.

Nitter

A reply

I rarely record my wild howlings. There have been many times when I have traversed solo into the forest, or into the desert, & have shrieked... just simply for the joy & pleasure it brings. Same thing with running around nude amongst the wilderness. There is just something so vastly freeing & liberating about it. May this post here be a testament for all to embrace your inner animal, in a fun & safe way. To take a break from the concrete jungle & to fully immerse yourself in the natural one. I promise you, that you will be thankful you did.

Tyrant lizard king? No thanks, fuck the monarchy. Spinosaurus is cooler anyway (the modern depictions of him, not the terrible Jurassic Park version). hell yeah, look at that crocoduck and his powerful tail, I bet he could just smack T. rex with that tail and it would be over.

Did you know a crocodiles tail is just as dangerous at its jaws? That shit is pure muscle for swimming, it can break bones. Big heavy theropods like T. rex are fucked if they get a broken leg.

I prefer herbivorous dinosaurs though. Therozinosaurus is hilarious and I love him. BEHOLD

They got another Yacht, and SANK it

Edit Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/11/06/orcas-attack-yacht-gibraltar/

Two leopards take a drink at the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana, in a stunning photo taken from a new book, Remembering Leopards. Featuring photos donated by wildlife photographers around the world, the book is one in a series that has donated more than £1m to conservation projects

Photograph: Margot Raggett/Remembering Wildlife/PA

I love garter snakes so much, this one was curious and friendly and slid right across my leg after telescoping a bit for me to take a photo.

After years-long discussion, birds will no longer be named after people — a decision meant to dissociate the animals from problematic eponyms.

The American Ornithological Society announced Wednesday that all common English-language names of bird species named after people will be changed, along with other monikers that have been deemed offensive. In total, approximately 70-80 birds — primarily in the US and Canada — will be renamed.

“There is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today,” said Colleen Handel, president of the AOS, in a statement.

Many birds sport names that come from White men with “objectively horrible pasts,” according to the group Bird Names for Birds, a grassroots initiative that has been advocating for this change. Having their names memorialized in this manner is similar to building a statue in their honor, the group argues.

The Hammond’s flycatcher, for example, is named for William Alexander Hammond, a former US surgeon general. Hammond held racist views toward both Black and Indigenous people, writing that Black people specifically were of “little elevated in mental or physical faculties above the monkey of an organ grinder.”

Judith Scarl, the executive director and CEO of AOS, said in a statement that there has long been historic bias in how birds have been named, and scientists should work to eliminate that bias.

“Exclusionary naming conventions developed in the 1800s, clouded by racism and misogyny, don’t work for us today, and the time has come for us to transform this process and redirect the focus to the birds, where it belongs,” she said.

Though efforts toward renaming birds existed before, the movement gained momentum in 2020, in the midst of large-scale cultural upheaval surrounding racist or otherwise offensive names — like those of sports teams and school buildings. That same year, Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher, made headlines after a White woman called the police on him — highlighting some of the prejudices Black people face in the outdoors.

In 2021, the AOS announced an ad-hoc committee to make recommendations regarding these common English names. The committee was formed in 2022 and released its guidance earlier this year. Wednesday’s move by the AOS is in response to those recommendations, and the renaming project is set to begin next year.

The video was made by Kenneth Catania - a neuroecologist.