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The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.
âMore than fifty research and development facilities across thirty-one states. Gone. Consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. And âconsolidatedâ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because what it actually means is that decades of place-based, long-term ecological researchâthe kind that literally cannot exist anywhere else because it depends on specific forests, specific watersheds, specific ecosystems studied over generationsâwill be snuffed out.
You cannot move a thirty-year watershed study. You cannot relocate a decades-long old-growth monitoring program. You cannot box up a forest and ship it to Colorado. When these facilities close, the experiments die. The datasets end. The partnerships with universities that took generations to build collapse. And the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran those programs walks out the door, because the administration damn well knows most of them wonât follow a forced relocation to a single consolidated office that has nothing to do with the ecosystems theyâve spent their careers studying.â
Nine regional offices. 57 research labs. 193 million acres. An interactive map of what was lost.
Call your senators. Both of them. Tell them the Forest Service reorganization is proceeding without the congressional approval required by Section 716 of the Agriculture Appropriations Act and Section 421 of the Interior Appropriations Act. Use those numbers. Say them out loud. Staffers write down what they donât recognize, and these are the provisions their bosses voted for.
If your senator is a Republican, the question is simple: you voted for a law that requires USDA to get committee approval before reorganizing or relocating any office. USDA didnât get that approval. Their own lawyers declared your law unconstitutional. What are you going to do about it?
If your senator is a Democrat, the question is just as simple: the legal basis for stopping this already exists. Where are the subpoenas? Where are the hearings? Why is USDAâs general counsel allowed to declare a duly enacted law unconstitutional by internal memo and face no consequences?
Make them answer. Make their staff write it down. Call back next week and ask what happened.
(source)
5 Calls
Shell-Nesting Mason Bees: these bees build their nests in empty snail shells, using crushed leaves and soil to form the inner brood chambers and then sealing the entrance with debris
Bees of the family Megachilidae typically build their nests in the gaps and crevices in tree stumps, rocks, plant stems, and wooden structures, but there are a few species that prefer to nest in discarded snail shells. These shell-nesting bees are primarily found in Europe, North Africa, and the Near East; a few can also be found in North America, South Africa, and Japan.
Above: just some cozy little mason bees
These are solitary bees, meaning that they don't form colonies or live together in hives, and each female builds her own individual nest. The nest is constructed as a series of brood cells, and each cell contains a single egg with enough pollen and nectar to sustain the larva until it reaches adulthood.
Shell-nesting mason bees are known to exist in at least four different genera, including Osmia, Rhodanthidium, Wainia, and Protosmia.
Above: Osmia spinulosa and Rhodanthidium septemdentatum, both of which build their nests in snail shells
When the female is ready to nest, she carefully selects a shell and then drags it into a shaded or well-hidden spot. Moving the shell is no easy feat, but she clings to it with her hind legs and pulls herself along by grabbing objects with her mandibles. A single bee may travel like that for several meters before finally settling on the right spot to prepare her nest.
Above: a mason bee dragging her shell into position
This article describes how the nest is then constructed:
The bee begins to build its nest, mainly within the âwhorlâ or spire of the shell. A typical nest consists of a few chambers (about two or four in number, depending on the size of the shell) known as cells, the walls of which consist of masticated leaf pulp known as leaf mastic. When fresh, the colour of this material is bright green, but with time, it assumes a brownish or black colour. Each cell is provisioned with a mixture of pollen and nectar, an egg is laid on this, and the cell sealed with further leaf mastic.
The female must make dozens of trips just to gather the provisions for a single brood cell, and completing the entire nest can take days.
Above: the the internal structure of this nest is partially exposed, revealing a central brood cell, a single larva, a supply of pollen/nectar, and several layers of debris
Once the brood chambers have been constructed and provisioned, the entrance to the shell is "bricked up" with several layers of plant pulp, soil, pebbles, and shell fragments. In some cases, the female will also apply patches of plant pulp to the outer surface of the shell as a way to provide camouflage.
Above: mason bees sealing their nests with plant pulp
The completed nest is then carefully maneuvered so that the entrance faces the ground. Some females will conceal the entire nest beneath a pile of twigs, pine needles, and plant stems. Moss and blades of grass are also woven throughout the pile. All of the debris is carefully selected, positioned, and then "glued" together with saliva, forming a tangled, tent-like structure over the nest.
Above: Osmia bicolor, commonly known as the red-tailed mason bee. constructing a protective thatch over her nest
In other cases, the female will conceal the nest by creating a small hole in the sand and then dragging the shell into it, ensuring that the nest is partially buried.
Above: Osmia aurulenta and Osmia rufohirta
This is just one of the many peculiar nesting habits that can be found among solitary bees. Several other examples have been featured in my previous posts, which describe the nest-building strategies of woolcarder bees, resin-pot bees, and a ground-dwelling species known as Osmia avosetta.
Above: the fully-constructed nest of a shell-nesting mason bee
Sources & More Info:
Bulletin of the Amateur Entomologists' Society: Shell-Nesting Bees
The Little Book of Bees: Snail-Nesting Mason Bees
University of Hradec KrålovÊ: Bees Nesting in Empty Gastropod Shells
The Wildlife Trusts: Red-Tailed Mason Bees
Journal of Hymenoptera Research: Comparative Biology of Four Rhodanthidium Species that Nest in Snail Shells
Journal of Hymenoptera Research: Biology of Palaearctic Wainia Bees of the Subgenus Caposmia
Cambridge University Press: The Native Shell-Nesting Bee Osmia conjuncta
Wired: Adorable Bees that Live Inside Snail Shells
âClueless White Guy is Granted the Mandate of Heaven, Shocks Qing Restorationistsâ
im not complaining because i expect you to fix anything im complaining to bond with you. omggggg find your hater spirit

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Blorboborus:
When you find out your new blorbo is just your old blorbo with a new coat of paint which was just the even older one with a-
post brought to you by the bastard huntsman that hurled itself away from me in a panic for five minutes before i gave up and walked away
a meba đŚ is almost like a really really small anermal but not quite
hey asshole! you lifted up the rock and now I have to scuttle! motherfucker!

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Skill Issue
Skill Issue
Skill Issue
Skill issue
skill issue
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Skill issue
Skill issue
skill issue
sorry for bitching and whining. unfortunately i have to or else ill start killing and eating people instead
by A. L. Clement
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Greetings from your friendly neighborhood National Park Service worker.
The government wants you to think a shutdown is no big deal. It's is. They want things to keep running in the meantime. They will- but not safely and not paid. Because not everyone is necessarily aware what a shutdown means for Gov workers, this is how it works...
Employees fall into one of the following three categories:
Excepted: Unpaid, required to work (those needed to protect life and property).
Exempted: Paid, required to work (those funded by non-lapsed sources)
Furloughed: Unpaid, employees that are neither excepted nor exempted. These employees have been ordered to "expeditiously complete orderly shutdown activities" then head home. This may be a few minutes for some employees or a few days depending on their job duties and what it takes to perform an "orderly shutdown" of their activities.
Who is furloughed? Legit everyone but "safety" workers. So fees, maintenance, timekeepers, facilities, everybody. And no, those thousands of people will not be paid for whatever amount of time they aren't working.
Who is Exempted? In my neck of the woods (pun intended) it's law enforcement, fire, ems, search and rescue and dispatchers. Hey that sounds like a lot? Guess what - almost all of the law enforcement in the park are simultaneously EMS, search and rescue and the Fire department. One person, four jobs. That's the way... It always is by the way, which is HIGHLY PROBLEMATIC (but that's a different rant). We will keep doing those four jobs, unpaid and unsupported. When will we get paid for our work?- who knows. You may ask yourself - why do we have to keep working when everything is shutdown? Because they're not closing the national parks. Yeah. So people are going to keep coming, keep using the bathrooms that won't be cleaned, keep using the roads that won't be maintained safely, keep getting hurt and in trouble.
Right now, there is a massive rollover DUI car accident on one side of the park and someone just got gored by an animal on the other side of the park. So all of us (the three people on shift at the moment) will be figuring out which one to heading out to. We have to choose. And it's going to be extremely dangerous when we do get on scene because those "non-essential workers" that were furloughed? -Those are the people we count on daily to go above and beyond their own normal duties and help.
Those are the people who manage traffic around the accident for us so we don't get hit. Those are the people that get extra resources for us (lights for night time, blankets, Gatorade if it's a long extraction on scene). Those are the people that make sure we get paid for being called out in the middle of the night, the people that make sure all the protocols are being followed so everyone is safe, the victim advocates that talk to the families, they are the essential hands needed because- if you haven't all forgotten- they already gutted our limping agency staff by like 30%.
What can you do?
The usual things you see - pester your local and government officials. Pester your money makers though even more - the businesses that give money to your local officials. But more immediately? Please do not come here. Please do not further burden the system. Tell other people not to come. Don't let the government think we can make it work still- we can't. Do not make us have to function as if things were okay, because they are really really not.
Greetings from Week Five of the shutdown.
Whatâs new?
Well, for a small group of us first responders, the government has now ordered that we be paid⌠from our parkâs admission fee money fund. The admission fee money fund that is supposed to go directly towards improving the park â fixing roads, cleaning and fixing facilities, visitor experience stuff. The admission fee money fund thatâs supposed to cover those improvements for the entire year⌠Is now being used to pay us. So guess what happens when that runs out? A.) no more pay, B.) no improving the park.
But the parks are still open? So wouldnât the fees of people still coming in cover part of that? No. Because weâre not allowed to collect fees during the shutdown. The parks are open, not gaining any revenue, burning through their reserves, and becoming significantly more unsafe and generally trashed and destroyed, by the day.
What does that look like?
Last week it was very icy and a tour bus of 50 people slid partially off the road, blocking a whole lane of traffic. This was on the MAIN ROAD, on a blind curve, only 10 miles into the park.
We only have one remaining, non-furloughed plow/sander driver. For reference, we normally have 4-5. He was 50 minutes away (and then the sander broke so he had to go back to the garage for a bit to try and fix it.) The one remaining tow truck driver was almost 90 minutes away. There was only me and my coworker on shift to deal with traffic and we couldnât direct people around the accident because the road all around it was still icy because the sander hadnât gotten there and someone was bound to slide off again. So we had to just keep traffic stopped. For almost a two hours, every single visitor to the park was in stopped traffic. About 10 miles worth of cars just sat, parked in the road. Hundreds and hundreds of people.
Some of them turned around to go back to the entrance, but an RV slid off the road going the other way, so now traffic was blocked in both directions. Which meant when the sander WAS fixed, it couldnât get through the traffic. And because it was just me and my coworker, we didnât have anybody who could leave the scene of the accident to go down and clear that traffic for the sander.
As I stood there in the cold (thankful that I had pulled my yaktrax out of storage soon enough to use them for the occasion because the road was SOLID ICE) people kept getting out of their cars, coming up to me, and complaining. Iâm not allowed to give political opinions at work, but I was able to provide them facts:
Fact: We only have one plow truck driver, because everyone else has been furloughed. If we had our normal amount, all the roads would be sanded and this probably wouldnât have happened.
Fact: We only have two officers on right now. Usually, we can try to pull some people from other divisions to help with traffic- those people are also furloughed.
Fact: The reason you are in traffic right now is directly caused by the government shutdown.
The main thing I want to communicate to the general public, though, comes from the repeated question I got âWell, if the roads were so dangerous why didnât you just close the park?â
Maâam?
Fact: The administration has forbidden us from closing National Parks.
We were ordered to âContinue operations and services as normalâ⌠with at least 65% of our staff furloughed.
Fun epilogue to the story is that 2 hours in, just as the sander and tow truck finally arrived, another car went careening off the road about 30 miles from there, blocking traffic for both lanes. I left one scene and came to that one we discovered the drive was HURT, and needed an ambulance. My coworker and I are also the EMTs/ambulance drivers (and fire department and search and rescue andâŚ) so we had to have our dispatch center start calling people at home to come in and help. (Their overtime wonât be paid until the government restarts by the way).
Five people came in on their day off and we managed to transport to the hospital, do the crash report, clear the road⌠and deal with SEVEN MORE slide offs in the following two hours.
What are the takeaways from all this complaining Iâm doing:
Fact: 65% or more of National Park Service staff that are furloughed and have no income right now. They still have bills though, and some people are in significant trouble financially (because itâs not like they paid us much in the first place).
Fact: Coming to your national park right now is not only extremely dangerous for you, but also causing significant and irreparable damage to the park- to the actual natural resource, to our infrastructure, and to our facilities.
Fact: Parks were ordered to use the finances that we usually would put towards keeping up said facilities and infrastructure, to pay the people we are forcing to work right now. BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT HAS FORBIDDEN PARKS TO CLOSE THEIR DOORS AND SHUT THEIR GATES.
Please don't come here. Please contact your local representative. Please spread the word
Because it looks like it's going to be another busy day.

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this reply made me laugh harder than any reply I think I've ever gotten
How did they find the worst audio ever made
"surely an exaggeration" i thought, before hearing the worst audio ever made
i watched this without audio first bc i didnât notice and I was thinking âhm impressive. monke make thingyâ but then saw the discussion and could only get through one and a half second of audio
This gives @hawkpartys vibes