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Hah! Excellent work!! Glad this post is helpful

Uh, I saw your post and you mentioned that you teach the kids... how do I put it... that are given to you at social functions due your park ranger aura for safekeeping how to tell the difference between predatory lightning bugs and normal lightning bugs.

And then you didn't tell us that secret! May I ask you to share the difference between predatory lightning bugs and normal ones?

Thank you very much :)

By popular demand and because this was the most polite ask: how to tell the predatory lightning bugs from the non-predatory lightning bugs.

First, there are over 2000 species in Lampyridea. I am not qualified to distinguish between all that. I grew up in Northern Ohio (71 species) and every year summer wasn’t official until the lightning bugs came out in the evenings (usually the first or second week of June).

This is our first clue. The first lightning bugs out each evening are a species of non-predatory chaps. Their glow goes in a special pattern. Flash, pause, “J” shaped flight about 2 -3’ off the ground. Repeat. Their glow is more yellow and lingers. These are the males of Photinus pyralis or the common eastern firefly. They look like this:

(Photo from iNaturalist: a lightning bug beetle, mostly black with gold lines around the wing casing. Head shield is yellow with a red “eye” with black iris in the center. Rounded front and back, long down the center.)

Their females hide in tall grasses waiting for the right suitor. If you’re lucky and clever you can see her dimmer flash in the grass beaconing the males closer.

As the dark of night progresses you’ll start to see a quicker, brighter, greener flash. Blip, blip, blip, blip, long pause. They are FAST! They’ll also mimic the flashes of Photinus females. These are usually higher up off the ground. Even in the trees! These lightning bugs aren’t looking for love.

Photuris (not gonna get to specific epitaph on this one without a sample and a key) are looking for dinner!

(Photo from blog.greatparks.org another lightning bug beetle. This one is slightly larger than the non-predatory bug. It has “shoulders” and extra gold lines running through the back. Its legs are longer and its shield is more “sharp”. The shield marking is less like an eye and more like a yellow D where the inside is a red triangle with a black line running through.)

Another way to tell is to go out at night and catch a bunch of lightning bugs (if you can; I hear they’re getting scarce). Offer them a slice of apple. If you wake up in the morning to only a few and the rest are dead, good chance you found some predators. (This is how I found out about them! Wooops!!)

Lightning bugs are freaking magical. I’m so sad to hear that they are yet another wonder that we are losing at an alarming rate. If this bugs you as much as it bugs me there are a few things you can do to help them:

1) do not spray for mosquitoes! That spray is not-species specific. It’s bad for lightning bugs. It’s bad for monarch butterflies. It’s bad for birds. It’s bad for bats. It’s bad.

2) kill your lawn. But Misha! You said they breed in the grasses! True! However native plants are going to provide so much more habitat for these guys than a gross monoculture of Kentucky bluegrass ever will. The Midwest has some of the best native plant nurseries in the country! Use that resource!

3) Advocate for them and donate to conservation if you’re able. Bugs don’t have voices and they fight an uphill battle just for being a bug.

Thanks for joining my ranger talk! Support your parks.

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For about a year my family lived in Arizona when I was a teen. It was a huge shock for me. The desert was a polar opposite to the moist lush woods I was used to. I acclimated unwillingly. I learned to check boots for scorpions and how to survive the heat.

My dad, whether by carelessness or obliviousness never changed his habits. This caused some problems for him. See, after a year I was so miserable that I jumped ship and moved in with my nana back in my home state. My mother wasn’t ready to lose her last few years with me at home and followed suit a few months later.

My dad soldiered on alone. He’d stay for three weeks in Arizona then come visit us for two weeks. It was rough but we all made it work. However that left my dad a bachelor for long stretches at a time, doing his own cooking and cleaning.

He’s never been much for house work.

Lazy or stupid, I’ll never know, but that man took to eating in bed. If crumbs or food detritus graced his sheets, well, he reasoned, he’d get to it sometime.

My mom or I would have caught his behavior if we’d been there, but we weren’t. See, what we’d learned from our stint in the desert is that times are tough. Animals have to work harder to survive and any low hanging fruit would soon be a target for an opportunist.

That’s how my dad woke up covered in a whole colony of ants who’d moved in overnight to feast on the remains of his lonely meals. The ants were gracious enough to leave the white meat sack alone as they indulged in his leavings.

He told us about his shame on his next visit and we both scolded him soundly. You’d think he’d have learned better what to leave lying around. But I think you know he didn’t.

Over the summer my mom and I joined him there, heading out to a local swimming attraction. It’s called Slide Rock. The river forms a natural waterslide over smooth algae covered rocks and we were all delighted to go for a weekend. On the second day of our visit we arrived at the park and took turns changing into our bathing outfits in the privacy of the van.

My mom and I were preparing to wait for my dad to change when he came bursting out of the van moments after having gone in. Flailing and naked, his dick felt the touch of the sun while I joined his screaming and averted my eyes.

You see, my father had left his damp swim trunks on the floor the night before. A cool moist lump of fabric is like a luxury hotel to desert critters and my idiot dad thought nothing of scooping his trunks right up to wear a second time.

He hadn’t noticed the extra guest. Which is how he’d started to pull on his trunks only to see a scorpion skittering avariciously toward him. Every jagged point of its carapace from pincers to sting was aimed menacingly at the soft flesh of his family jewels. He’d come flying out of the van sending both his trunks and the scorpion flying having finally learned his lesson.

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I had a dream last night that tumblr came up with a pride flag for closeted gays and it was just a light blue flag with a shrimp on it. People would also wear shrimp pins on their lapels for some Reason???

and the vegan gays started Discourse because shrimp deserved more respect

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PSA from Blobby. Something we should talk about more ❤️

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At least do the sky puppies right.

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Two years after being tasked with commissioning a review of medical evidence surrounding gender-affirming care for trans youth, Utah’s own state health department has concluded that trans healthcare bans “cannot be justified.” The Republicans who commissioned the study aren’t too happy about it.

Back in 2023, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a bill that placed an indefinite “moratorium” on doctors prescribing gender-affirming care like hormone therapy and puberty blockers to trans youth. That bill ordered the Utah Department of Health and Human Services to compile their report in order to produce recommendations for the state government on whether or not to lift the moratorium.

This week, the department delivered their long-awaited, over 1,000-page report — which is dated August 6, 2024 — to Utah lawmakers. The report’s authors found that “the consensus of the evidence supports that the treatments are effective in terms of mental health, psychosocial outcomes, and the induction of body changes consistent with the affirmed gender in pediatric GD [gender dysphoria] patients.”

The authors added that “the evidence also supports that the treatments are safe in terms of changes to bone density, cardiovascular risk factors, metabolic changes, and cancer.” Trans youth who had received gender-affirming care were within the bounds of normal, non-pathological ranges for these conditions.

y’all this is huge. please don’t “water is wet” all over it! I understand that we all already know this… The point is that the world doesn’t know or care or believe and so these studies really fucking matter!

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Eating their moistened food

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Beautiful Street Art in Hollywood. Walk of shame. By the way .....FUCK DONALD TRUMP!

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Fish Pond 🐟 - ig | bsky | x | coms | kofi | prints

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No new developments on the usage of this, very favorite, box of Bean’s.

Bean got a new box.

I reached out to her for comment.

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This was taken six years ago before I saw the post.

I saw a post about this tree on Tumblr and I had to have a photo with it. It is magnificent!!

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Once the birds had learned how to initiate video interactions, the second phase of the experiment could begin. In this “open call” period, the 15 participating birds could make calls freely; they also got to choose which bird to dial up. Over the next two months, pet parrots made 147 deliberate video calls to other birds. Their owners took detailed notes about the calls and recorded more than 1,000 hours of video footage that the researchers analyzed.

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My dad raises grass-fed beef cattle and I help him sell it, mainly by maintaining an online presence. For a while, I kept having the most ridiculous conversations with people who I assume were marketing students. I didn't want to be rude so I'd try to let them down gently but this one guy just kept insisting that with his magical marketing skills he could grow our business.

What he could not seem to comprehend is that we could not grow our business, at least not without significant time and monetary investment. Cows take two years from pregnancy to the size that you can sell. If we buy adult cows, our margins become razor thin or even negative. Even if we somehow could acquire some cows, our barn and hay fields are already near maximum capacity. Renting another field would be relatively easy, building a bigger barn not so much.

Cows are living animals, they aren't widgets that can be produced infinitely. Besides that, many businesses inherently cannot grow, because if they do they'll become something else. The delicious bakery down the street cannot produce much more than they do, if they began mass marketing and production they'd eventually be selling the equivalent of Twinkies. We grow grass-fed, organic beef, if we expanded how long would that last? Eventually we'd become the very factor farms that we hate. Some things can only ever be made on a small scale and they are usually the best things.

But also, what are they teaching them at marketing school and how is it so disconnected from reality?

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I thought y'all might like to see Niagara Falls lit up for Pride.

Hope you had a good one!

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Starting using a cane has been a real game changer for me. Yesterday I went to a pride and did the whole walk, arriving at the end not too tired, thanks to the cane that helped me with balance and not putting too much weight on my legs. When I was doing marches without a cane it felt like hell most of the time.

Mobility aids are freedom, guys, no matter what society thinks or says. It’s not giving in. It’s not shameful.