howdy

Or submission Sunday if it's already Sunday, where you live. 

Please only submit your own photos and feel free to submit the following…

Photos of wild animals and plants

Photos of landscapes, natural places, national or state parks, your favorite trail photos.

Photos of native plants or pollinator plants from your garden.

You… In a wild place, hiking, canoeing, kayaking, birdwatching, etc.

Please do not submit photos of pets or other captive animals.

I love you XOXO 

If you submit ID requests (with geographical info!!!) or requests for posts, I will not get to them until next week.

I'll be out birdwatching along the Gulf Coast this weekend, looking for migrants.

Local dentist saw a shadow on an x-ray for an unrelated visit and found bacteria eating away at my tooth and skull thats been happening for years. It hasn't been spotted until now because I wasn't showing any of the associated symptoms.

I need multiple surgeries to get the remains of the front tooth broken into pieces and removed, the bacteria scrubbed off, a bone graft applied to my skull, an implant installed and of course a new crown manufactured and screwed in.

They urged me to do it as soon as possible or else it will get worse.

If u could please donate / share ill be endlessly grateful ❤️

grizzled mercenary: it's getting dark, keep moving

puppygirl: puppy dog city's real. it's a city full of puppy dogs, a place i'll belong & fit in, it's home. i saw it

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.