#local ecology

[deepdrearn]

Argiope bruennichi, EN: wasp spider, NL: tijgerspin

Discovered by my friend on my birthday party. He was so excited he took everyone to see her. She used to be extremely rare in the Netherlands, but climate change has made this a suitable place for her now. Despite her ferocious look, she's not dangerous to humans at all.

#wasp spider #local ecology #insects #spiders on tumblr

[butchysterics]

americans imagining Land Back as a reverse colonization where your family is violently displaced from their home—just no, and there’s so much projection and anti-indigenous sentiment in that reaction that we need to unpack. in the same way abolishing private property does not equate to taking the personal property/housing from regular human beings, land back deserves your full attention in the actual demands and futurities that native people are calling for. this knee jerk resistance against land back needs to stop inventing hypotheticals instead of engaging with the reality of this which is A. a broader political call to rematriate land to indigenous communities, who currently have limited resources because this is a settler colonial state B. specific calls to return specific lands—often ‘public lands’ i.e. national parks, blm land etc—which often carry cultural significance and also very direct legacies of violence tied to the original displacement. C. a return to indigenous land management strategies, which are place-based and culture-based and offer paths to restoring/reclaiming/reconfiguring the ecologies and human communities most damaged by colonialism/capitalism/the world we currently live in D. land back is deeply tied to the movements protesting oil and gas pipelines, catastrophic mining, etc ongoing destruction of the environment that place indigenous communities on the frontlines yet threatens /everyone/ downstream who drinks water and has a body

#this is such a complex issue that starts to unravel american society when you unpack it #in a good way that asks—okay what do we do next? how are we going to live here and do right by our neighbors and their+our descendants? #regardless of who is in Power/who heads the State #we live on the ground we stand on we’re responsible to our local ecologies and our neighbors #this is where i’m at politically as a white settler

[myxomycota]

Arcyria glauca

by Michael Harz, China.

#arcyria glauca #i think.. it was unspecified but likely A. glauca #based on locality and colour but there may be other similar species #arcyria #michael harz #slime mold #myxomycota #slime mould #protists #eukaryotes #fungi #macro photography #microbiota #microorganisms #microbiology #ecology #biology #clusters

[fatehbaz]

Endangered Indian sandalwood. British war to control the forests. Tallying every single tree in the kingdom. European companies claim the ecosystem. Spices and fragrances. Failure of the plantation. Until the twentieth century, the Empire couldn't figure out how to cultivate sandalwood because they didn't understand that the plant is actually a partial root parasite. French perfumes and the creation of "the Sandalwood City".

---

Selling at about $147,000 per metric ton, the aromatic heartwood of Indian sandalwood (S. album) is arguably [among] the most expensive wood in the world. Globally, 90 per cent of the world’s S. album comes from India [...]. And within India, around 70 per cent of S. album comes from the state of Karnataka [...] [and] the erstwhile Kingdom of Mysore. [...] [T]he species came to the brink of extinction. [...] [O]verexploitation led to the sandal tree's critical endangerment in 1974. [...]

---

Francis Buchanan’s 1807 A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar is one of the few European sources to offer insight into pre-colonial forest utilisation in the region. [...] Buchanan records [...] [the] tradition of only harvesting sandalwood once every dozen years may have been an effective local pre-colonial conservation measure. [...] Starting in 1786, Tipu Sultan [ruler of Mysore] stopped trading pepper, sandalwood and cardamom with the British. As a result, trade prospects for the company [East India Company] were looking so bleak that by November 1788, Lord Cornwallis suggested abandoning Tellicherry on the Malabar Coast and reducing Bombay’s status from a presidency to a factory. [...] One way to understand these wars is [...] [that] [t]hey were about economic conquest as much as any other kind of expansion, and sandalwood was one of Mysore’s most prized commodities. In 1799, at the Battle of Srirangapatna, Tipu Sultan was defeated. The kingdom of Mysore became a princely state within British India [...]. [T]he East India Company also immediately started paying the [new rulers] for the right to trade sandalwood.

British control over South Asia’s natural resources was reaching its peak and a sophisticated new imperial forest administration was being developed that sought to solidify state control of the sandalwood trade. In 1864, the extraction and disposal of sandalwood came under the jurisdiction of the Forest Department. [...] Colonial anxiety to maximise profits from sandalwood meant that a government agency was established specifically to oversee the sandalwood trade [...] and so began the government sandalwood depot or koti system. [...]

From the 1860s the [British] government briefly experimented with a survey tallying every sandal tree standing in Mysore [...].

Instead, an intricate system of classification was developed in an effort to maximise profits. By 1898, an 18-tiered sandalwood classification system was instituted, up from a 10-tier system a decade earlier; it seems this led to much confusion and was eventually reduced back to 12 tiers [...].

---

Meanwhile, private European companies also made significant inroads into Mysore territory at this time. By convincing the government to classify forests as ‘wastelands’, and arguing that Europeans would improves these tracts from their ‘semi-savage state’, starting in the 1860s vast areas were taken from local inhabitants and converted into private plantations for the ‘production of cardamom, pepper, coffee and sandalwood’.

---

Yet attempts to cultivate sandalwood on both forest department and privately owned plantations proved to be a dismal failure. There were [...] major problems facing sandalwood supply in the period before the twentieth century besides overexploitation and European monopoly. [...] Before the first quarter of the twentieth century European foresters simply could not figure out how to grow sandalwood trees effectively.

The main reason for this is that sandal is what is now known as a semi-parasite or root parasite; besides a main taproot that absorbs nutrients from the earth, the sandal tree grows parasitical roots (or haustoria) that derive sustenance from neighbouring brush and trees. [...] Dietrich Brandis, the man often regaled as the father of Indian forestry, reported being unaware of the [sole significant English-language scientific paper on sandalwood root parasitism] when he worked at Kew Gardens in London on South Asian ‘forest flora’ in 1872–73. Thus it was not until 1902 that the issue started to receive attention in the scientific community, when C.A. Barber, a government botanist in Madras [...] himself pointed out, 'no one seems to be at all sure whether the sandalwood is or is not a true parasite'.

Well into the early decades of twentieth century, silviculture of sandal proved a complete failure. The problem was the typical monoculture approach of tree farming in which all other species were removed and so the tree could not survive. [...]

The long wait time until maturity of the tree must also be considered. Only sandal heartwood and roots develop fragrance, and trees only begin developing fragrance in significant quantities after about thirty years. Not only did traders, who were typically just sailing through, not have the botanical know-how to replant the tree, but they almost certainly would not be there to see a return on their investments if they did. [...]

---

The main problem facing the sustainable harvest and continued survival of sandalwood in India [...] came from the advent of the sandalwood oil industry at the beginning of the twentieth century. During World War I, vast amounts of sandal were stockpiled in Mysore because perfumeries in France had stopped production and it had become illegal to export to German perfumeries. In 1915, a Government Sandalwood Oil Factory was built in Mysore. In 1917, it began distilling. [...] [S]andalwood production now ramped up immensely. It was at this time that Mysore came to be known as ‘the Sandalwood City’.

---

Text above by: Ezra Rashkow. "Perfumed the axe that laid it low: The endangerment of sandalwood in southern India." Indian Economic and Social History Review 51, no. 1, pages 41-70. March 2014. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading in this post added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

#a lot more in full article specifically about #postindependence indian nationstates industrial extraction continues trend established by british imperial forestry management #and ALSO good stuff looking at infamous local extinctions of other endemic species of sandalwood in south pacific #that compares and contrasts why sandalwood survived in india while going extinct in south pacific almost immediately after european conques #abolition #ecology #imperial #colonial

[daydreams-ethrialthings]

IF YOU DON'T LIKE BATS WE CAN'T BE FRIENDS

🦇🖤🦇

[Not My Art]

#bat #bats #bat lover #bat lady #batty for bats #🦇 #bats are beautiful #important to me #ecology #local ecologically #not my art #art #fairycore #fantasy #daydream #fae

[nando161mando]

Don't believe what they tell you

#comic #comics #cartoon #climate justice #climate leaders #climate science #ausgov #politas #climate activists ‘may try to wreck the rollout of voter id measures at the local elections’ #climate emergency #climate change #climate crisis #climate and environment #climate action #climate challenges #climate chaos #ecological #ecology #econotego #auspol #tasgov #taspol #australia #neoliberal capitalism #fuck neoliberals #anthony albanese #albanese government #earthfirst #san jose earthquakes #earthporn

[outerspace-iiinnerspace]

The thing I actually desperately need to know about Worm is WHAT happened to all of Taylor's bugs when she ran off to become Weaver. Not her swarm bugs - I assume she either brought those with her or they went off to rejoin the local environment. I wanna know what happened to all those fancy spiders and exotic creepycrawlies she was keeping in her lair. She had whole walls lined with terrariums. That's a lot of bugs. Did everybody forget about them and they died and then some poor minion had to go and clean out a room of dead bugs? Did someone open all the containers and let them out into the environment and they died there? Did someone open all the containers and let them into the environment and they become invasive and create even more problems for Brockton Bay? Did Charlotte take over and provide bug husbandry for two years? Did Lisa take over and provide bug husbandry for two years? Did either of them attempt to take over and provide bug husbandry but give up and let them die/release them/turn them over to an entomologist? What happened to the damned bugs.

#worm #parahumans #skitter #taylor hebert #darwins bark spiders were mentioned by name and those are NOT native to new england #i would like to believe that they got out somehow and multiplied and became invasive. seems fitting #as if everyone doesnt have enough to deal with already #taylor is so destructive to the local ecology

[thetwistedrope]

The earliest written accounts of life on the coast, from the late 1700s, often refer to this area as being an “untamed wilderness.” The coast did not look like an English Garden, or a European farm, nor did the cultivation of these lands stand out with obviously unnatural or artificial features but rather was molded closely with the local geography. These authors did not recognize a form of cultivation that was unfamiliar to them. To their unaccustomed eyes, the coast was wild. It was not. A local example can be found at Mittlenatch Island. The small island looks rather unremarkable from the Campbell River shore; however, a closer inspection reveals just how intensely it was cultivated. Nearly all the “wild” flowers and shrubs are edible in some part, either their roots or their fruits. Some species, such as Camas, require regular harvesting and even controlled burning to increase its production. 

#indigenous #ecology #farming #?? #agriculture #local cultus

[deepdrearn]

I spent three days in the Ardennes with my dad and these are the only pictures I took. One includes a Camino sign and the other a mega interesting kind of sphere shaped hemiparasite plant that lives in trees and is known as European Mistletoe. It's as mythical as it is toxic.

#local ecology #ardennes #El Camino #can I tick that Paulo Coelho instilled cliche off my bucket list now?

[mosswolf]

i keep seeing people who aren't usamerican reblogging that post about being protected under the migratory birds act and im like lol no tf u arent

#google ur local bird protection legislation resist the americanisation of the nature conversation!!!; #p sure theres treaties w places like canada under the usa migratory birds act #but idk if thats the same as birds being protected under the same legislation in canada so take with a grain of salt #you Might have a migratory birds protection act! #here in the uk tho im pretty sure birds are protected under the countryside & wildlife act overall #ecology #rowanposting

[ducksbyday]

Hello Tumblr people

My name is Day, I am 21 years old and a full time ecology student. I've been studying ecology/biology for about 9 years, and yet I hear stories on the regular that leave me absolutely baffled.

I want so share some of my favourites with you, enjoy :) (will probably be updated over the course of time)

Parrots can be taught how to videocall, and actively enjoy calling with other parrots (Kleinberger et. al, 2024)

Some species of (wild) eel only procreate in/close to the bremuda triangle (Nolte, 2020; Browne, 2021)

(google on own discression) Snail love arrows. It's fucking WILD.

Female common bluetails (damselfly) have evolved to look physically exactly like male common blue tails so they are left alone during mating season (Kuta, 2023)

People feeding their christmas tree to goats because it's good for their health (in moderation!) (Laufenberg, 2024)

CHIMPANSEES SLEEP IN NESTS (Wikipedia, n.d.a) As someone who knows nothing about primates, this was an eye opener to me

Talking about monkeys, This video (I taught an ape how to play minecraft)

(CW// animal neglect) "Cloth mothers" (and the maternal-separation tests in general) (Wikipedia, n.d.b)

Researchers continuously trying to bring back extinct animals (such as heck cattle)

The entirety of Flevoland, Netherlands. They really just- did that.

Het Diemerpark, Amsterdam, NL. A park build on thousands of kilo's chemical waste and trash. They just put a big box over it and moved on like it was nothing (Gemeente Amsterdam, n.d.; AGV, n.d).

Why are there so many ways to photosynthensise???

The mirror test, and the single elephant that passed the test (Wikipedia, n.d.c.)

(I wish I had a better source, but for now this will do TvT. It's something my teacher shared in a lecture). Dutch zoo houses rhino's and cows in same area. Calf annoys rhino. Rhino yeets calf into the air, calf breaks his leg, heals, does it again, gets yeeted again, breaks leg again (Damen, n.d.).

Some places place green-light lanterns in the street because green = good for the invironment. This is absolute bullshit. Green is one of the worst colors, and was originally introduced to chase away geese (Spoelstra, 2017).

Currently don't have a source, it was shared during a reading of a ecologist. There's a population of wolves that live soley of fish and stranded carcasses. Wolves have cultures, and you can sometimes tell which wolf belongs to which family based on their diet.

(THANKS TO USER TIGOTEUS!!) Koi (Cyprinus carpio) can be taught recognise and tell the difference between music genres (Chase, 2001). THIS IS SO COOL I DID NOT KNOW THIS. Also shout out to fish Pepi, he tried his best.

Now I shall continue writing the actual essay that I need to finish by tomorrow LMAO <3

#ecology #biology #animals #Idk why I wrote this #I have a lot more important things to do #but alas #I am very exited about the fish study #Its genuinely such an interesting read #My local libary has the Was Fische Wissen book in stock #I might actually go get it. It sounds awesome

[kaiyves-backup]

We are finally, FINALLY getting our windfarm!

#You don’t know how many stupid lawsuits and local disputes we had over this it was so embarrassing #But we’re actually finally getting wind power here and I’m so happy #EcoLogical #news #new york state of mind

[fatehbaz]

Nothing in the past, moreover, gave any cause to suspect ginseng’s presence so far away. Or even closer by: since antiquity, for well over a millennium, the ginseng consumed in all of East Asia had come from just one area -- the northeast mountainous lands straddling Manchuria and Korea. No one had found it anywhere else. No one was even thinking, now, to look elsewhere. The [...] [French traveler] Joseph-Francois Lafitau didn’t know this. He had been [...] visiting Quebec on mission business in October of 1715 [...]. He began to search for ginseng. [...] [T]hen one day he spotted it [...]. Ginseng did indeed grow in North America. [...]

Prior to the nuclear disaster in the spring of 2011, few outside Japan could have placed Fukushima on a map of the world. In the geography of ginseng, however, it had long been a significant site. The Edo period domain of Aizu, which was located here, had been the first to try to grow the plant on Japanese soil, and over the course of the following centuries, Fukushima, together with Nagano prefecture, has accounted for the overwhelming majority of ginseng production in the country.

Aizu’s pioneering trials in cultivation began in 1716 – by coincidence, exactly the same year that Lafitau found the plant growing wild in the forests of Canada. [...]

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Since the 1670s the numbers of people [in Japan] clamoring for access to the drug had swelled enormously, and this demand had to be met entirely through imports. The attempt to cultivate ginseng in Aizu -- and soon after, many other domains -- was a response to a fiscal crisis.

Massive sums of silver were flowing out of the country to pay for ginseng and other drugs [...]. Arai Hakuseki, the chief policy maker [...], calculated that no less than 75% of the country’s gold, and 25% of its silver had drained out of Japan [to pay for imports] [...]. Expenditures for ginseng were particularly egregious [...]: in the half-century between 1670s through the mid-1720s that marked the height of ginseng fever in Japan, officially recorded yearly imports of Korean ginseng through Tsushima sometimes reached as much as four to five thousand kin (approx. 2.4–3 metric tons).

What was to be done? [...] The drain of bullion was unrelenting. [...] [T]he shogunate repeatedly debased its currency, minting coins that bore the same denomination, but contained progressively less silver. Whereas the large silver coin first issued in 1601 had been 80% pure, the version issued in 1695 was only 64% silver, and the 1703 mint just 50%. Naturally enough, ginseng dealers in Korea were indifferent to the quandaries of the Japanese rulers, and insisted on payment as before; they refused the debased coins. The Japanese response speaks volumes about the unique claims of the drug among national priorities: in 1710 (and again in 1736) a special silver coin of the original 80% purity was minted exclusively for use in the ginseng trade. [...]

[T]he project of cultivating ginseng and other medicines in Japan became central to the economic and social strategy of the eighth shogun Yoshimune after he assumed power in 1716. [...]

---

China and Korea were naturally eager to retain their monopolies of this precious commodity, and strictly banned all export of live plants and seeds. They jealously guarded as well against theft of mature roots: contemporary Chinese histories, for example, record that the prisons of Shenjing (present day Shenyang) overflowed with ginseng poaching suspects. So many were caught, indeed, that the legal bureaucracy couldn’t keep up. 

In 1724, the alarming numbers of suspected poachers who died in prison while awaiting trial led to the abandonment of the regular system of trials by judges dispatched from Beijing, and a shift to more expeditious reviews handled by local officials. [...]

Even in 1721. the secret orders that the shogunate sent the domain of Tsushima called for procuring merely three live plants [...]. Two other forays into Korea 1727 succeeded in presenting the shogun with another four and seven plants respectively. Meanwhile, in 1725 a Manchu merchant in Nagasaki named Yu Meiji [...] managed to smuggle in and present three live plants and a hundred seeds. [...]

Despite its modest volume, this botanical piracy eventually did the trick. By 1738, transplanted plants yielded enough seeds that the shogunate could share them with enterprising domains. [...] Ginseng eventually became so plentiful that in 1790 the government announced the complete liberalization of cultivation and sales: anyone was now free to grow or sell it.

---

By the late eighteenth century, then, the geography of ginseng looked dramatically different from a century earlier.

This precious root, which had long been restricted to a small corner of the northeast Asian continent, had not only been found growing naturally and in abundance in distant North America, but had also been successfully transplanted and was now flourishing in the neighboring island of Japan. […]

---

Colonial Americans, for their part, had developed their own new addiction: an unquenchable thirst for tea. […] This implacable need could have posed a serious problem. [...] [I]ts regular consumption was a costly habit.

Which is why the local discovery of ginseng was a true godsend.

When the Empress of China sailed to Canton in 1784 as the first ship to trade under the flag of the newly independent United States, it was this coveted root that furnished the overwhelming bulk of sales. Though other goods formed part of early Sino-American commerce – Chinese porcelain and silk, for example, and American pelts – the essential core of trade was the exchange of American ginseng for Chinese tea. [...]

---

Yoshimune’s transplantation project had succeeded to the point that Japan actually became a ginseng exporter. As early as 1765, Zhao Xuemin’s Supplement to the compedium of material medica would note the recent popularity of Japanese ginseng in China. Unlike the “French” ginseng from Canada, which cooled the body, Zhao explained, the “Asian” ginseng (dongyang shen) from Japan, like the native [Korean/Chinese] variety, tended to warm. Local habitats still mattered in the reconfigured geography of ginseng. [...]

What is place? What is time? The history of ginseng in the long eighteenth century is the story of an ever-shifting alchemical web. [...] Thanks to the English craving for tea, ginseng, which two centuries earlier had threatened to bankrupt Japan, now figured to become a major source of national wealth [for Japan] .

---

Text by: Shigehisa Kuriyama. “The Geography of Ginseng and the Strange Alchemy of Needs.” In: The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Yota Batsaki, Sarah Burke Cahalan, and Anatole Tchikine. 2017. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

#all kinds of fun stuff smuggling piracy biogeography medicinal tea shogunates secret orders #the irony of emerging US empire beginning relationship with china based on export of american ginseng which europeans hadnt known existed #the irony of japan quickly transitioning from almost being bankrupted by ginseng to becoming a ginseng exporter #the importance of local habitats and smallscale biogeography despite the global scale of imperial trade #the french cartographer in 1711 in manchuria who had never been to canada but correctly predicted ginseng might grow there #abolition #ecology #imperial #colonial

[acti-veg]

‘Only when livestock numbers fall so far that their husbandry scarcely qualifies as food production is animal farming compatible with a rich, functional ecosystem. For example, the Knepp Wildland project, run by my friends Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell, where small herds of cattle and pigs roam freely across a large estate, is often cited as an example of how meat and wildlife and can be reconciled (..)

If their system were to be rolled out across 10 per cent of the UK’s farmland, and if, as it’s champions propose, we obtained our meat this way, it would furnish each of the people of the United Kingdom with 420 grams per head, enough for around three meals. This means a 99.5 per cent cut in our consumption (…) If all the farmland in the U.K. were managed this way, it would provide us with 75kcal per day (one thirteenth of our requirement) in the form of meat, and nothing else.’

George Monbiot, Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet

#george monbiot #vegan #food security #sustainability #local tho #regenerative farming #quotes #enviroment #ecology

[nando161mando]

She's not just talking the talk.

Greta Thunberg is walking the walk.

___________________________

Climate activist Greta Thunberg has been found guilty by a Swedish court of disobeying a police order at a protest in Malmo last month.

The 20-year-old avoided a potential prison sentence and has been fined. She pleaded not guilty and told the court: "My actions are justifiable," according to the Sydsvenskan newspaper.

Greta was charged because she refused to comply with police orders to leave the scene during the protest, according to Swedish Prosecution Authority spokeswoman Annika Collin and a statement from prosecutors.

When the protestors were ordered to move to allow vehicles to pass, Greta was among those who refused. She was then dragged away by police.

Earlier in the year, the climate activist was briefly detained by police in Oslo during a protest against wind farms built on Indigenous land in Norway. She was also detained during protests against the demolition of the coal village of Luetzerath in Germany in January.

___________________________

FULL STORY --

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #ClimateAction

#greta thunberg #climate and environment #environmentalism #climate justice #climate leaders #climate science #climate activists ‘may try to wreck the rollout of voter id measures at the local elections’ #climate emergency #climate change #climate crisis #climate action #climate catastrophe #ecological #econotego #ecology #ausgov #politas #auspol #tasgov #taspol #australia #neoliberal capitalism #fuck neoliberals #anthony albanese #albanese government #malmo #oslo #norway #luetzerath #fortress europe

[charmixpower]

It depends on what you mean by that

Do you mean that Zenith only made small changes to their climate? That interpretation makes no sense within the context of the conversation. Stella asks why Zenith is so cold, asking the cause, and Tecna replies that it was made to be like this by the people on Zenith. This directly states a causal relationship between Zenith being cold and the people of Zenith wanting it to be a specific temperature. Implying that Zenith would not be this temperature without intervention. If Zenith was naturally cold "We calibrate the climate" would make zero sense as a response to Stella's question. It would be like replying "because I have a fan" when someone asks why it's cold in the poles. That response only makes sense if this coldness is artificial. It only makes sense if Zenith being cold is a direct result of the people of Zenith's actions

Do you mean that the people of Zenith would make small changes over time, eventually leading it to be this cold? This would still likely cause several mass extinctions, unless it was done over at LEAST a million years, plants and animals would still face a mass extinction. Macro evolution takes millions of years, and while some plants and animals will get lucky and be able to quickly evolve to (very likely) drastically different conditions (as implied by the context of the conversation) but this would be few and far between. Quoting the Intentional Union for the Conservation of Nature "Climate change currently affects at least 10,967 species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™, increasing the likelihood of their extinction." And "The ~1ºC rise in mean global temperature is causing serious and often unexpected impacts on species, affecting their abundance, genetic composition, behaviour and survival.". This is a 1°C change, Zenith going from not cold or notably less cold to notably colder, unless it was done over many millions of years, would absolutely cause mass extinction events

#this isn't even getting into what having a constant temperature would do to local ecology #a lack of cycles would fucking destroy everything but i REFUSE to get into systems chemistry #winx club #rus chatters #winx zenith #winx season 5