Just Another Rock Pool

Like, seriously, why isn’t this in more movies? Why did I have to make the .gif myself?

Arctic Ocean- Where would you go, if you could go anywhere? 

North Atlantic Ocean- Gender? 

South Atlantic Ocean- Sexuality? 

Indian Ocean- Eye color? 

North Pacific Ocean- Hair color? 

South Pacific Ocean- Do you like the beach? 

Atlantic Ocean- What do you like to do at the beach?

Striped Colonial Anemone- What’s your favorite sea creature? 

Acantharea- What do you like most about the beach?

Angelfish King- Do you prefer to swim or stay on the sand? 

Albacore- Do you collect shells? 

Armored Snail- Have you ever made a successful sandcastle? 

Arctic Char- What are you thinking about right now? 

Atlantic Cod- What’s your favorite ice cream flavor? 

Atlantic Goliath Grouper- What’s your favorite thing to drink during the summer?

Brown Trumpetfish- Do you like slushies? 

Atlantic Wolffish- What’s your favorite weather? 

Baleen Whale- How late do you prefer to stay up when you have a day off of work/school? 

Barnacle- Do you like lemonade? What’s your favorite flavor?

Barracuda- Do you like ice in your drinks? 

Bass- What drink do you drink in the morning? 

Bluebanded Goby- What is your favorite book?

Bluehead Wrasse- Do you have any pets?

Bluefish- What’s your star sign/zodiac?

Blue Marlin- When is your birthday? 

Spiny Lobster- What’s your favorite food? 

Christmas Tree Worms- What’s your favorite holiday?

Clam- Choose your horror movie team (the people you would want with you in a horror movie).

Cod- What character are you in the horror movie? 

Fangtooth- What’s your favorite movie? 

Fish- What’s your least favorite movie? 

Shell- What’s your favorite tv show? 

Seagull- Do you prefer to be hot/warm or cold?

Seafoam- What’s your favorite thing to do when you have free time? 

Saltwater- What’s your favorite season?

Sand- If you had to pick one drink to drink for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Shark- Give a random fact about yourself.

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.

See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done. 

BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back. 

And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels. 

There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.) 

They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed. 

So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem. 

And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable. 

And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer. 

Barnacle Larvae

Amphibalanus eburneus

When we think of barnacles, we think of the hard, white crustaceans that grow on the side of boats and docks. However, barnacles go through a variety life stages and metamorphosis before they spend their life on a hard surface. The image above is a barnacle larvae when it is in the cypris stage, think of it as a baby barnacle. This larvae is an example of zooplankton and spends a short period of time floating around in the water column.  The second image summarizes the life cycle of a barnacle. 

Photo source: https://www.nyharbornature.com/blog/barnacles-are-reproducing

The number of times I see cutsey videos of a lion cub, otter, wolf pup, monkey, etc. playing in someone's living room and people are concerned until, after digging, someone confirm the person making the video runs a rescue or something has started to really bother me.

Yes, public outreach and education is crucial to fundraising for most wildlife causes, but it's possible to engage viewers while making it clear that wild animals do not make appropriate pets (and most people aren't capable keepers!).

Not to mention videos where a person finds injured/orphaned baby wildlife and decide to raise it themselves, illegally, and then make a “cute” video about how the animal lives with them now because it didn’t want to leave. Yeah no shit because you habituated it you ass hat, you didn’t do that animal any favors. And don’t even get me started about MBD.

These people that think those videos are so damn cute are then encouraged to do the same if they find an orphaned animal. These are the people that “take care of” wildlife without a permit or any knowledge/training on the species and what care it requires, and then finally find a licensed rehabber when the animal stops thriving, when it’s too late. They’re the same people who yell at and shame rehabbers for having to make the compassionate decision to euthanize the animal that THEY FUCKED UP. But still never come to grasp the reality of what they did is actually wrong.