Dream dragons

It’s not “proving that crickets can be traumatized”. It’s proving that *animals can genetically pass on the stress that a dangerous situation causes, and the offspring will instinctually respond to the same situation without ever having personally experienced it.*

And that’s a big deal for many things, including human psychology.

When Nazis invaded The Netherlands, local Dutch peoples were under extreme emotional and physical duress. The Nazi army took their food for the soldiers, starving the population. They patrolled the streets and harshly reinforced their new laws. Existence was horrible and some parents had to give their children away to wealthier families because they couldn’t feed them anymore. This event is known as the Hongerwinter, or Dutch Famine.

One generation later, the children of mothers who were pregnant at the time of the famine have been proven to exhibit intense reactions to stress, and heightened fight or flight responses. They also experience more obesity because their bodies are prepared for starvation.

Some of these children were never personally exposed to the famine. Their mothers gave birth after conditions had improved, or even after moving to another country. But the effects are there, and those people are now adults who can recognize this and attest that they didn’t experience something else traumatic during childhood. It was passed on in the womb.

You can read about it here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/science/dutch-famine-genes.amp.html

This is called epigenetics. It’s essential to understanding how the human brain and body works. That our responses to stress can be passed on genetically. That it can show up in how we look physically, our physical health, our mental responses, our instinctual reactions. It’s especially important for people who are in therapy and need to understand *why* they act a certain way before they can actually work on it.

Busy Bee.

Some flowers change appearance when they’ve been pollinated to tell other pollinators (bees, butterflies, whatever) not to visit! Forget-me-nots change the inner circle from yellow to white. White clover flowers droop down as they’re pollinated so the flowers closer to the centre get a chance!

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Florida medical examiner’s report has raised questions about a 17-year-old Fort Myers resident’s death from COVID-19 complications last month. The teenager, Carsyn Davis, was a cancer survivor with a rare, ongoing autoimmune disorder. She died of respiratory failure after contracting the new coronavirus in early June.

The medical examiner’s report notes that Davis attended a 100-person church event, where people were not required to wear face masks, roughly two weeks before she died in a Miami-Dade County hospital. During the nine days that followed, she was given antibiotics, hydroxychloroquine and oxygen via her grandfather’s portable machine by her parents while at home. Her mother, Carole Brunton Davis, is a nurse. The hospital recommended intubation when Davis was admitted to its pediatric unit on June 19, but her parents declined the procedure, according to the county medical examiner. She received plasma therapy and was eventually intubated on June 22, but died one day later.