Adult Wasps Love Sweet Sweet Nectar, While Their Larva Need MEAT! Happy Pollinator Week!

Weird peeve time. Calling lab grown gemstones “fake” is stupid because it’s the same shit just not formed naturally. An artificially grown diamond is the same shit as a natural diamond it is the exact same material bro it’s all fuckign carbon

reblog if you’ve read fanfictions that are more professional, better written than some actual novels. I’m trying to see something

Something something gay people gravitate towards weird and unpopular animals

20,000 Pounds of Trash Removed From Pacific Garbage Patch: ‘Holy mother of god. It worked!’

The man who won't rest until the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is cleaned up has successfully tested his system for doing so.

““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.

Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.

Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.

The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.

GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.

It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life…

Slat estimates ten Jennies could clean half the garbage patch in five years, and if 10 Jennies were deployed to the five major ocean gyres, then 90% of all floating plastic could be removed by 2040.” -via Good News Network, 10/19/21

Northern Plains tribes bring back their wild 'relatives' — endangered foxes and ferrets

Native species such as swift foxes and black-footed ferrets wiped out from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana are being reintroduced.

As extinctions of animals and plants accelerate around the globe, Native American tribes with limited funding are trying to reestablish imperiled species and restore their habitats — measures that parallel growing calls to “rewild” places by reviving degraded natural systems.

But the direct relationship that Native Americans perceive between people and wildlife differentiates their approach from Western conservationists, who often emphasize “management” of habitat and wildlife that humans have dominion over, said Julie Thorstenson, executive director of the Native American Fish & Wildlife Society.

“Western science looks at humans as kind of external managers of the land and of the ecosystem,” she said. “Indigenous people see themselves as part of it.”

The Nakoda and Aaniiih people have struggled to restore their land to a wilder state. Plague periodically wipes out ferret populations, and half the foxes released so far may have died or fled.

But tribal members say they’re committed to rebuilding native species with deep cultural significance to restore balance between humans and the natural world. Tribal elders speak nostalgically of the long-gone Swift Fox Society, which prized the secretive, rarely seen animals and used their pelts and tails to adorn hair braids and costumes. They call the foxes and ferrets their “relatives.”

“It’s like having your family back,” said Mike Fox, former director of the Fort Belknap wildlife program. “We have a pretty darn good spot on the Northern Plains to bring these animals back and just about complete the circle of animals that were originally here.”

Read more

For anyone who doesn't know what's going on in Canada right now (which, let's be real, is probably everyone who's not in Canada):

This week, a mass grave was discovered at a former Indian Residential School, in Kamloops, BC. The grave contained the bodies of 215 Indigenous children.

For people outside of North America, residential schools were places that Indigenous children were sent to, to have their language and culture stripped away from them. They were literally stolen from their families, and scattered across Canada, to ensure that they would be surrounded by children who didn't speak their language. They were given Christian names and forced to speak English. They were horrendously abused, and the survivors have been traumatized.

Hundreds of children never returned. The assumption has always been that they died. This has now been confirmed.

The school in Kamloops closed in 1978. They are now trying to identify bodies to inform family members. The last residential school closed in the 1990s. There is growing demand to search all of them, but the government hasn't responded to that, as of yet. Ottawa JUST gave in to pressure to fly the Canada flag at half mast. They weren't even going to do that.

This is the reality if anti-Indigenous racism in Canada. The residential schools may be closed, but that hasn't stopped the abduction of Indigenous children, let alone the hundreds of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

WHY THE FUCK DID NOBODY TELL ME ABOUT THIS

petition-please help UK trans people!

hi tumblr-the conservative party is back at it again. 

currently, the GRA (gender recognition act) says to transition “legally”, trans people have to: 

 get two diagnoses of gender dysphoria (including one from an NHS gender clinic, which have a 2-3 year wait time currently), 

prove you have lived as your chosen gender for 2 years, 

swear to live the remainder of your life as such

and  do all of this in front of a “gender recognition panel”, a process which is very humiliating and largely depends on people deciding if you are “trans enough”. 

in 2018, the idea was put on the table to progress the rights of transgender people in the UK. Including: 

 allowing them to self identify as their chosen gender (including 16 & 17 year olds, who have previously been denied the right to)

demedicalising the transition progress, no doctors would need to diagnose gender dysphoria to transition.

removing the cost to have your gender legally recognised

allow non-binary identities to be recognised

it has recently been leaked that the current government has scrapped these ideas [source  source]. Our equality minister, Liz Truss, is horribly transphobic and wishes to backpedal on the few rights we have. 

trans people have said for years that the GRA is outdated and in need of reform, and have had the tiny ray of hope that it may be changed ripped out from under us behind closed doors. 

petitions on the parliament website are legally obligated to be responded to at 10k signatures and have to be debated in parliament at 100k signatures. please note you have to click a confirmation link in your emails before your signature is counted!

only british residents can sign this, but if you are not from the uk, please boost it so your british followers can see! 

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/327108

thank you-and fuck the tories ✌🏳‍🌈 

hi any life advice for 21yo

Don't date thirty-year-olds until you are at least 25.

Having a glass of water for every glass of alcohol will give you a 50% reduction in hangover viciousness.

Bad people will use your willingness to be quiet as a weapon against you. If someone's being awful to you and trusting you'll be quiet to keep from making waves, surprise them.

There is no physical object in the world that is worth as much as your honor.

Honor is not the same as dignity. Retaining one sometimes means leaving the other aside.

Don't have any sex you don't want to have; have as much as you want of the sex that you do, whether that's a lot, a little, or none at all. Nothing you can do to your own body is immoral, unless you're doing it as an act of self-punishment.

Food is morally neutral. You do not have to earn the right to eat calories. Fat and sugar keep your brain from eating itself.

Learning to sit still and breathe--in, in, in, hold, hold, hold, out, out, out, out, out, out--can give you five feet of clear space around yourself in a maelstrom.

Find out how to make three good meals: A comfort meal you can make for just yourself relatively easily, a fancy meal you can use to wow a date, and a meal you can feed a bunch of people. All the other cooking can come later, but you can build a community on those three meals.

If you ever get to the point that things are so bleak you can see no other way forward but to die, make any other choice. If that means leaving everything you own and being a beach bum, or quitting your career, or taking up or leaving a religion, or deciding to bicycle across the country, so be it; living means more chances, dying means everything stops and you don't get to see any more interesting things. As you have not yet seen all the things that can interest you, it is better to live.

I’m sorry. Your url is amazing. But you’re still a bot.