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For those not in the know, this is one of the Amanita mushrooms referred to as a Destroying Angel. Never, ever, ever, ever forage with an app. Especially for mushrooms.

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Seems like all the things people say are "missing the point" or "not doing enough" about saving pollinators, actually are doing some good.

Like No Mow May and leaving your lawn weeds alone, sure it's important to be planting species native to your area, but cosmopolitan lawn weeds like dandelions are actually really important for pollinators even in areas where they're not native. Gas powered lawn mowers put out a shit ton of CO2, way more per hour of use than cars, and the other air pollutants caused by lawn mowers are bad for us, so it's great to cut down on lawn mowing any way possible.

And on top of all that, a month of not mowing gives enough time for wild flowers to start growing where they couldn't before, so if you participate in no mow may, you might not NEED to plant native flowers because you might already have them

same thing with "save the bees" and focusing on honeybees, the pesticides that are affecting honeybees are also killing our native pollinators, so it will benefit them all to stop spraying.

people getting into beekeeping is good, even though honey bees aren't the ones endangered, it shows people how they are in symbiosis with other life forms.

And I'm reading a book about beekeeping, cause dad wants to keep bees, and the book says if you keep bees you will have to talk to your neighbors about pesticides and how they will harm the bees. That is a benefit to the whole ecosystem if someone is educating the people around them about the harms of pesticides

On top of that, more people are experiencing firsthand that honey comes from bees and consequently, understanding that insects aren't just scary and bad, and when they see a bee maybe they won't feel threatened and want to destroy it but instead think "oh yeah that is my friend that gives me delectable treats"

It is recommended to offer your neighbors honey from your hives. If they put pesticides on their flowers, they will put poison in the honey they were promised, if they get any honey at all

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my take on Colossal Biosciences' stupid stunt.

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Puma or Cougar or Mountain Lion (Puma concolor), LEUCISTIC, family Felidae, Serra dos Órgãos National Park, Brazil

photos via: Lucas Gonçalves da Silva

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Lol. Lmao even

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Shorebird Nesting Season Is Here!

Summer shorebird surveys provide some of our most important data. Data collected during nesting season help us track nesting outcomes, detect population changes, measure the effect of conservation efforts, and refine strategies for population recovery. Did you know that 5 of the shorebird and seabird species nesting in Florida are imperiled species? Every nest is critical!

Here are a few things you can do to help shorebirds succeed this summer:

Give Birds Space: Getting too close can force birds away from their nests or chicks leaving them vulnerable to predators, the elements, or being stepped on! You should walk around resting birds on the sand or at the shoreline (some may be too young to fly!) and avoid landing kayaks and vessels near nesting areas.

Keep Out! Do not enter posted areas, even if you don’t see a bird. Their camouflage helps them blend into nesting habitats like open beach, shell rakes, spoil islands, marsh edges, and more!

Please, No Dogs: Even friendly pups frighten shorebirds and can cause them to abandon their eggs and chicks. If you bring your pet with you, go to a dog-friendly beach where they’re allowed and keep them on a leash far away from nesting or resting birds.

Stash the Trash! Garbage and food scraps attract predators, such as raccoons and crows, that prey on shorebird eggs and chicks.

For more information, resources, and volunteer information in FL: MyFWC.com/Shorebirds

Shorebird images by Brittney Brown, FWC

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Excerpt from this story from Anthropocene:

Call it the mystery of the invisible squirrels.

Shortly after Elizabeth Carlen arrived in St. Louis for job as a postdoctoral researcher at Washington University, the biologist posted a message on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

“Wondering about bias in community science data? Here is an example from St. Louis,” she wrote. Then Carlen posted two maps. One showed the city’s stark racial segregation, with its northern half mostly black and southern half predominantly white. The other showed where sightings of Eastern gray squirrels had been recorded on the app iNaturalist, used by phone-wielding amateur naturalists to report their observations.

Judging by the app, there were virtually no squirrels in the city’s northern neighborhoods, something that Carlen, whose research focuses on how urbanization affects squirrels, knew wasn’t true. “Squirrels are abundant in the northern part of the city,” wrote Carlen. “But there are no recorded observations.”

Her insight spawned an online conversation among scientists, and now a peer-reviewed paper, about the blind spots and biases that can skew data gathered through informal amateur networks – often known as citizen science.  

Citizen science has become an important part of biodiversity research – whether it’s volunteers collaborating directly with scientists to gather data, researchers tapping into apps like eBird or iNaturalist, or even people just posting pictures of wildlife on their Instagram feeds.

But as the St. Louis squirrels show, such data can produce results that have little to do with natural history and a lot to do with human society.

“We need to be very conscious about how we’re using this data and how we’re interpreting where animals are,” said Carlen, who is based at the university’s Living Earth Collaborative, which is dedicated to the study of biodiversity.

In the new paper, which Carlen co-wrote with 13 other scientists at institutions around the country, the scientists offer a cautionary road map of the ways in which bias can creep into such data gathering and the resulting picture of the natural world.

For starters, the data depends on who participates and where they are located. Observations from sites like eBird tend to be concentrated in cities and near roads, because that’s where the most people are, not because birds prefer it. Likewise, wealthier people are more likely to take part in citizen science, increasing the likelihood that data will come from where they live. Racial disparities – which can reflect social and economic inequities – have also emerged in citizen science, with white participants overrepresented relative to people of color.

Then there are the different ways people discriminate towards the organisms they are spotting or where they go looking for them. Reclusive species, such as salamanders that prefer to hide from site, get less attention than showy animals or plants. People are more likely to report wildlife sightings when they are in parks or on trails. And then there is our preference for colorful or unusual creatures.

“There’s not a lot of people photographing rats and putting them on iNaturalist — or pigeons, for that matter,” Carlen said.

The case of the St. Louis squirrels is a stark example. Carlen found that while tree cover and city parks are relatively evenly spread around the city, not so entries to eBird or iNaturalist. Those make it look like the southern half of the city is teeming with wildlife – including squirrels, while the northern half is a naturalist’s desert.

These imbalances can have implications beyond scientific papers, the authors warn. If that data is used to help inform decisions about where to focus conservation efforts such as habitat restoration or protections, it can further amplify biases and inequality.

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Piebald European red fox (Vulpes vulpes crucigera) in Frankfurt, Germany. I've never seen a piebald red fox with this sort of pattern before!

Photos by doro64 || CC BY-NC 4.0

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I feel like it should be bigger news that in 2024 we found out a whole new category of Thing that apparently lives in humans and we have no fucking clue what it does

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Nature really went off with sperm whales. A 70-ton predator with teeth the size of a banana but it only eats squishy prey that it doesn’t even chew, it just schlorps them down whole like a vacuum cleaner. Big giant fat head full of goop. Tiniest fins in the world. Strong enough to smash a ship to pieces and smart enough to figure out how to do so but its first line of defense is just to shit everywhere. Possibly the most complex language in the animal kingdom and it creates sounds by blowing air through its internal right nostril (it uses the left one to breathe) into its giant fat head. It’s the loudest animal on the planet and might have the capability to create a beam of sound so loud it can shake your organs apart but they don’t seem to use that to hunt or fight. They’re highly flammable. We used them to make candles.

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obsessed with these photos of an albino (?) brandt’s cormorant. he looks like a sad little turkey

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when i die i hope i come back as a beautiful microscopic granule of sand

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It may seem unthinkable to us today, but once it was normal for the response to hearing a species was in danger of extinction to be "Let's go shoot a few before they're all gone!" This wasn't just among trophy hunters and wealthy collectors who felt entitled to acquire any species they wanted regardless of the impact, but biologists, museum curators, and other naturalists of varying sorts. Today conservationists and scientists have a much more enlightened and informed view of how to respond to a species' impending extinction, but this attitude has been hard-won over the past century.

Arthur Augustus Allen may not be as well-known as John James Audubon, but this ornithologist was incredibly instrumental in getting people to stop shooting rare birds with guns--and shoot them with cameras instead. As chairman of the American Ornithological Union's Committee on Bird Protection, he used his role to establish ethical resolutions that prohibited the taking of rare birds from the wild (in violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, no less) and emphasized the observation of live birds in the wild over killing more for preservation and study.

We would do well to emulate Allen's example. Today there are still greedy people who look at a forest and only see dollar signs, or whose only interest in an open area of wilderness is the mineral rights under the soil. They see a pair of antlers as a trophy (and leave the meat to rot), and consider any inconvenient animal like a gray wolf or prairie dog only fit to exterminate. Yet Allen is a symbol of resistance against the purely acquisitive, extractive approach to nature, and how education can change minds and hearts.

So to those of you working to inform the general public about the value of nature in its own right, and not just for what we can get out of it--keep up the great work! Arthur A. Allen certainly wasn't the only person who worked to get the word out about the need to protect dwindling species and their habitats, but I think his efforts deserve to be added to more popular knowledge of conservation.

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Ethiopian wolves feed on the sweet nectar of a local flower, picking up pollen on their snouts as they do so – which may make them the first carnivores discovered to act as pollinators.

The Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis) is the rarest wild canid species in the world and Africa’s most threatened carnivore. Endemic to the Ethiopian Highlands, fewer than 500 individuals survive.

Sandra Lai at the University of Oxford and her colleagues observed wild Ethiopian wolves lapping up the nectar of Ethiopian red hot poker (Kniphofia foliosa) flowers. Local people in the mountains have traditionally used the nectar as a sweetener for coffee and on flat bread.

The wolves are thought to be the first large carnivore species ever to be recorded regularly feeding on nectar.

“For large carnivores, such as wolves, nectar-feeding is very unusual, due to the lack of physical adaptations, such as a long tongue or specialised snout, and because most flowers are too fragile or produce too little nectar to be interesting for large animals,” says Lai.

The sturdy, nectar-rich flower heads of the poker plant make this behaviour possible, she says. “To my knowledge, no other large carnivorous predator exhibits nectar-feeding, though some omnivorous bears may opportunistically forage for nectar, albeit rarely and poorly documented.”

Some of the wolves were seen visiting as many as 30 blooms in a single trip. As they lick the nectar, the wolves’ muzzles get covered in pollen, which they could potentially be transferring from flower to flower as they feed.

“The behaviour is interesting because it shows nectar-feeding and pollination by non-flying mammals might be more widespread than currently recognised, and that the ecological significance of these lesser-known pollinators might be more important than we think,” says Lai. “It’s very exciting.”

Lai and her colleagues at the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme now hope to dig deeper into the behaviour and its ramifications. “Trying to confirm actual pollination by the wolves would be ideal, but that would be quite challenging,” she says. “I’m also very interested in the social learning aspect of the behaviour. We’ve seen this year adults bringing their juveniles to the flower fields, which could indicate cultural transmission.”

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Excerpt from this story from Smithsonian Magazine:

For the first time in 112 years, Chinook salmon are swimming freely in the Klamath Basin in Oregon.

On October 16, biologists with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) spotted the fish above the former site of the J.C. Boyle Dam in the Upper Klamath River. The dam was one of four that had blocked the salmon’s migration between the Klamath Basin and the Pacific Ocean. Each of those dams was recently deconstructed in the largest dam removal project in United States history, which has restored the river to its natural, free-flowing state.

At first, biologists wondered if they had really sighted a salmon. “We saw a large fish the day before rise to surface in the Klamath river, but we only saw a dorsal fin,” says Mark Hereford, leader of ODFW’s Klamath Fisheries Reintroduction Project, in a statement. “I thought, was that a salmon, or maybe it was a very large rainbow trout?”

But when the team returned on October 16 and 17, they were able to confirm the fall-run Chinook—making them the first to spot the species in the region since 1912.

The return of the salmon comes less than two months after the end of the dam removals in California and Oregon, an effort that took decades of advocacy by the surrounding tribes—including the Yurok, Karuk, Shasta, Klamath and Hoopa Valley, among others—whose people have deep ties to the Chinook salmon.

Ron Reed, a Karuk tribe member and traditional fisherman, participated in the campaigns for dam removal, advocating that the river’s restoration would help salmon recover. He isn’t surprised the fish have returned so quickly to their ancestral waters, he tells the Los Angeles Times’ Ian James.

“The fact that the fish are going up above the dams now, to the most prolific spawning and rearing habitat in North America, it definitely shines a very bright light on the future,” Reed tells the Los Angeles Times. “Because with those dams in place, we were looking at extinction. We were looking at dead fish.”

In one poignant case, tens of thousands of Chinook salmon died off in the span of days in 2002, as the water quality in the dammed Klamath River deteriorated from the lack of flow. The dams, built between the early 1900s and 1962, also contributed to algae blooms and diseases, and they blocked the salmon’s annual migration.