obligatory celebratory pizza

Red flags: Unbelievable nature you've never seen before!, no external source cited, low image quality could be hiding AI artifacts, lacks scientific name for plant, OP is an aesthetic blog (no offense, I see you credit most of the artists you post, OP <3).

Green flags: Common name of the tree provided (although the leaves don't look like any olive tree I've ever seen).

Reverse image searches and citation trails all seem to lead back to now-deleted Reddit posts. Google Images says it's this one in r/NatureIsFuckingLit, and TinEye says it's this one in r/interestingasfuck. Both were posted back in 2020. This is important because the rise of AI images was in 2022.

People in the comments of places this image is posted throw around botanical terms like "dichotomous branching" [branches split into two at the nodes] and "divaricated" [branches grow far apart from each other], which are cool, but don't tell me what the tree is.

Searching up "Black Olive" on iNaturalist finally got me some answers, and it turns out that YES. This is a real tree! This tree is a Dwarf Black Olive (Terminalia molinetii, Formerly Bucida spinosa). The above photos are some particularly nicely framed shots of a tree with particularly small leaves, which really highlights the branching structure. I really wish we knew the photographer's name. Here are some more photos of the same species:

Terminalia molinetii by jriveracruz50 on iNaturalist, posted under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

This tree is native to Southern Mexico, Belize, the southern tip of Florida, and Cuba. Dwarf Black Olives are completely unrelated to Olive trees in the Olea genus that I'm more familiar with (the former is in Order Myrtales [Myrtles, Evening Primroses, and Allies], and the latter is in Order Lamiales [Mints, Plantains, Olives, and Allies]).

go on an aimless bike/ride/walk - move your body, do it for as long as you feel like it, discover new places near you weather that is a frog or a cafe

watch a new movie/read a new book/listen to a new album - get inspired, excercise having opinions and longer attention span, break out of consuming content and make a choice about what you want to expirience

create something in a medium i haven't used in a while - get out of a habit, rekindle a flame you haven't been upkeeping, making a friendship bracelet counts

go have a fun new drink/snack - arguably most important, have a little treat without rush, slow down and focus on physical sensations, treat yourself in a way that isn't landfillcore

meet with friends and/or go to a place where you meet strangers - human connection is good for you, (maybe some casual sex if you like that/try something new with your partner)

make some bad art - create for the sake of creating without any expectations

play an instrument - this can be anything that makes you reach a kind of flow state

go see something you haven't yet - get to know the cultural/geographical map of your area, this includes events, places, or just anything that makes you go out of your way to expirience something new, can be like a viewpoint or it can be a museum exhibit, anything you find cool

the thing is: it doesn’t appreciably do that, because the feathers wick up water and mud, which cancels out any insulation advantage they might hypothetically confer, and also it wasn’t even put there on purpose.

the Leg Get More Hair gene is just linked to the Bones Get More Big gene. when you breed any lineage of horses to have bigger bones–not just taller, but chunkier–the leg hair just happens anyway. so every single breed of draft horse has feathered legs, and even carriage horses like friesians get feathers once they hit a certain threshold of lorge.

personally I stand with frog defender on this issue