Sunlit Green and Growing Things

Cladonia imperialis

I hate Ernst Haeckel with the deepest loathing, he was a terrible human being. He is famous for this and other historical lichen illustrations:

And you may recognize C. imperialis from the left-most figure. When I first saw this drawing, I noticed that he has taken some artistic liberties with some of the species I recognized. And I had wondered for years looking at his illustration how much creative liberty he took when drawing that guy on the left, since I hadn't ever seen it. But credit where credit is due, it looks pretty darn similar to the pictures and preserved specimens pictured here. SO terrible person, descent artist, I can give him that. Still hate him, though. This fruticose lichen has verticillate (arranged in whorls) podetia with spreading to recurved scyphi (cup- or goblet-shaped projections on the podetial stalks) proliferating from the center of lower scyphi in 8-17 tiers, up to 31 cm tall (likely the tallest terrestrial lichen in the world!). It is green-brown to brown in color with a darker, melanotic base and smooth surface. C. imperialis is native to the mountains of southern Brazil, and grows taller in higher-elevations regions.

images: source | source | source

Common Green Forest Lizard (Calotes calotes), male, family Agamidae, Kerala, India

Cressida Campbell (Australian, b.1960)

Well you see, everyone ALSO used to hate bees. Like. You guys are just too young to remember when everyone who wasn't an apiarist or a gardener or an ecologist was militantly aggressive towards bees Because They Sting You. People would burn their hives and kill them all when they were found, not call a bee guy to relocate them, they'd stomp bees in the clover if they saw them. They actively hunted down and destroyed hives.

The reason "everyone loves bees" isnt an arbitrary whimsical choice because they're cuter than wasps. It's because bee lovers made a HUGE effort to encourage people to see bees as valuable pollinators and friendly little guys that just want to defend their hive. They taught people to see bees as cute and fluffy! There were awareness campaigns about the value of bees, there were advertisements, there were little documentaries and articles teaching people how to readjust their views on bees so that the hatred of them didn't cause complete ecological and agricultural collapse.

Bee lovers used to be in the exact same position that everyone who loves other insects is - you say that you like this creature and everyone in a 10km radius comes crawling over to tell you all the ways they personally would kill them.

The fact that it's so common now for people to think bees are cute fun little guys doing an important job is a fucking monumental victory and it was hard won, and it's as recent as in the last 20 years. When I was a kid in the 90s, everyone hated bees except ecologists and bug guys.