huh?

I LIED !!!! GET PRANKED

POST BELOW ME GET FUCKING WET

#Iapprove

Redditors competing to make the worst volume sliders possible...

special delivery for @soffies!!!

Mutualistic pairs for an “Odd Couples” Valentine’s program at my work. (Why do so many of my big work projects revolve around Valentine’s programs?)

While humans have domesticated many other animals for their labor, the honeyguide remains entirely wild while electing to partner up with humans. Both humans and honeyguides have each developed specific calls to signal to one another that they are on the hunt, and these calls greatly increase the likelihood of success. According to this paper:

The production of this sound increased the probability of being guided by a honeyguide from about 33 to 66% and the overall probability of thus finding a bees’ nest from 17 to 54%, as compared with other animal or human sounds of similar amplitude.

That’s fucking bonkers, you guys!!! There are people out there who over the course of human history have created a sound to communicate with birds, and the birds themselves have a Human Call they use to communicate with us. There is no other wild animal you can just make noises at and immediately communicate that you want it to come help you!!!

What’s more, many scientists consider this relationship more exploitative on the honeyguide’s end than on our end! That’s unprecedented!! These birds have essentially negotiated a trade deal with humanity!!!! This is the stuff of fantasy movies, except it’s real.

Here’s an article from The Guardian about the broader implications of this kind of relationship with wild animals. It’s a good read:

This is false. This is 100% just flat-out wrong, holy shit.

To begin with, most species of plant depend on multiple mutualistic relationships to continue existence, period. For starters there is the mycorrhizal network, that is, the network of fungal hyphae in soil that are attached to plant roots and give the plants nitrogen and phosphorous in exchange for the products of photosynthesis. The earliest land plants formed mycorrhizae with fungi. This relationship is integral to life on earth as we know it.

Now consider that almost all flowering plants need pollinating insects to reproduce. Flowers EXIST because of the need to attract pollinators. Flowers, a thing that is so commonplace and widespread, are the product of tens of millions of years of mutualism.

And then, after pollination, many plants are reliant on a totally different set of organisms to distribute their seeds. Many seeds need to be scarified or they will not sprout. Basically, you have to scrape the seed with sandpaper, soak it in an acid, and generally beat it up a little to get it to sprout. Why? Because that seed is adapted to sprout only after having passed through the digestive system of a bird.

Edible fruits exist because of mutualism. Berries and fruits are so delicious and sugary and have such bright colors because they’re literally made to be appealing as food—they WANT to be eaten by an animal that will poop the seeds out somewhere else.

Lichens, has that writer never heard of lichens? Hello? Tube worms and their chemosynthetic bacteria? They don’t even know about the bryozoans that live on hermit crab shells oh my god. They don’t even know about the ACORN ANTS.

This is something I’m very passionate about actually; our inability to SEE mutualism in nature comes from this persistent bias we have, viewing nature as competitive and rewarding of “cheaters” and exploitation.

Stick insects, ladybugs, almost all moths, they could not exist if it wasn’t for the layer of leaves dropped by deciduous trees in fall, because they use those leaves to overwinter. Those leaves directly feed a whole community of detritivores, which in turn are an essential food source for predators. Burrowing insects aerate the soil. Plants NEED that for their roots to come into contact with nutrients and water.

Not all of these relationships are a one-to-one “monogamous” partnership, a lot of symbioses involve three or more partners, such as the complex partnerships comprising lichens. The more you look at the way organisms depend on each other, the more it becomes apparent that ecosystems are intricate webs of mutual interdependence.

Mutualism can be right in front of our faces without being acknowledged as such! Take Spanish moss, the curtain-like epiphytic plant found in coastal regions of the American Southeast. Birds picking some off for use as nesting material is a big way the plant gets to new places; it can vegetatively create new colonies by being carried off by a bird. (I bet the same is true of mosses, lichens, and even some seed plants.)

But here’s the REALLY annoying part:

*deep sigh*

I don’t even know where to start with this. None of our relationships with animals “count” as mutualism because…humans are capable of intent? Domestic animals aren’t free to run off into the wild? Am I interpreting that correctly?

Anyway, plenty of domestic animals benefit more from us than we do from them. Apart from mutualism, it is more defensible to interpret cats and dogs as brood parasites than anything. We protect animals from predators, cure their parasites and diseases, and give them food and shelter. I know modern day industrial farming practices can be ghastly in some cases but domestic livestock kept by small farmers that care about their animals live a life of luxury.

And there are plenty examples of mutualism that fall outside of “domestication.” Falconry. Beekeeping. Beekeeping is a pretty blatant example.

or the countless accounts of interspecies communication, warnings and mutual interest that are part of oral traditions. Vine Deloria Jr. in The World We Used to Live In accounts the various instances noted in colonizer’s journals as well as oral traditions.

-on childhood

After all, if you want to buy absolutely nothing - if you want to create a way to live separate from society - you cannot do it like Thoreau; even Thoreau wasn’t doing it like Thoreau; you have to create an separate society, a self-sufficient community, and live in that.

And interestingly Seymour put his finger on “why communes fail.”

In his experience, which was deep and broad, experiments in self-sufficient communities/communes virtually always failed. And not because the idealistic fools weren’t capable of growing crops, or chopping wood, or whatever. It isn’t even the founders were stupid or ignorant or inexperienced, or because self-sufficiency only attracts dramatic personalities. No, the communities he observed consistently failed because they had no ability to resolve conflict. Every group of people will have to come to a tricky decision, resolve a sticky situation, have an awkward conversation or even just get along with unideal situations. They didn’t fall apart because a sheep fell in a ditch; anyone can get a sheep out of a ditch; they fell apart over the arguments about ideology, ditches, sheep and blame. It was always some issue of conflict or communication that broke these well-meaning, well-intentioned, well-educated people apart.

Step back from that and think: people frequently try to live outside capitalism even in this modern world, people frequently try to live in the most environmentally-friendly way, people frequently try to envision an alternative to a hostile state, even in this world where it is difficult or impossible to do so. For every utopia you might picture, people (being people) will have already made a decent attempt at building and living it, in the hope of showing it or even giving it to you. And those utopias aren’t here at the moment for you to have, because it’s terrifically difficult to make communities out of nothing. And that’s largely because it’s very hard to have communication skills about anything at all, let alone something that gets you mad.

All the mommy bloggers, all the brosephs, all the every single customer or client or other person you have dealt with who you wanted to fucking strangle, or at least wanted to be allowed one of those amazing moments of Put Down that viral reddit posts are made of, every single frustrating as fuck human: they will be part of your post-capitalist utopia.

They will not wake up, the morning of the revolution, and suddenly become different people. Your choices will be to line them all up against a wall and shoot them . . . .or figure out how to live with them in your community. (And multiple revolutions in the past hundred years have tried that whole "line them up and shoot them" thing, tried it REAL HARD, and it didn't work out great for them either.)

The more de-industrial, de-urbanized, de-impersonal, whatever, your ideal society is? The more it will involve having to work, and work well, and work effectively and without interpersonal violence (physical or social) against people who irritate the fuck out of you.

And no, we never really had any Neat Trick to make that easier in the past. What we most often had was survival pressure so intense that the threat of being ostracized (or having the group turn on you) was enough to force resolutions that nobody was really happy with, or that left an unspoken wound to fester for generations, or to offer up a scapegoat to vent the community's violence on and then pretend to move on, or . . . .

Etc.

disorders that can cause dissociation include:

DID

OSDD

PTSD

depression

OCD

BPD

DPDR

anxiety

eating disorders

some people also experience dissociation due to chronic pain

being dissociated can feel like, but is not limited to:

feeling disconnected from the world

feeling "blurry", "buzzy", "foggy", or "out of it"

not feeling any emotions

not feeling any physical pain

not remembering whole periods of time

feeling like you're floating outside of your body

your brain constantly going in and out of focus

dissociation is generally broken down into two categories:

derealisation: the feeling that the world around you is unreal, foggy, or just out of reach

depersonalisation: the feeling of being outside of yourself, or of not feeling real

When the game’s premise first came to light—before JKR’s infamous anti-trans diatribe that specifically targeted transmascs and especially autistic transmascs—a lot of people rightly decried it because of its blatant antisemitism and the fact that it’s premise encouraged genocidal actions against the Jewish-stereotyped goblins.

And then, somehow, for some people, JKR’s transphobia erased the fact that we already KNEW that the game was bad because of the inherent antisemitism of its narrative.

There’s more reasons to hate JKR and not buy things she’s responsible for than just her transphobia. She’s not just a TERF; she’s a racist, antisemitic TERF.

Science is a PROCESS of observing, hypothesizing, manipulating variables, and developing theories on how the world works based on this. it's a technology for finding truth. it is not Itself truth

So, when you see trees in a forest, they stick up outta the ground, some distance from each other, and you're like 'these are unconnected critters,' right? But! The thing is! Just like the trees in the picture are connected above-ground, trees in a forest are normally connected below-ground. There's this whole complicated thing involving a symbiotic relationship with fungi, but we're gonna simplify it to this: trees connect to each other through their root systems.

And they use it to share resources, across the whole forest.

If there's a tree over here growing in soil with a lot of, like, potassium, they'll pull up more potassium than they need, and send it out through the root system to other trees that are living where there isn't much potassium.

And one of the coolest things? Trees communicate their needs. If a tree is sick or damaged or starving, they send chemical messages out through the root system that tell the other trees to send them more food and tree-equivalent-of-immune-system.

Trees will share so much of their resources, they'll even keep trees alive that are almost entirely dependent. Like this tree! The tree above is getting some energy from its leaves, but no other nutrition of its own. And it wasn't able to link up to the shared root system. So the other tree reached out and hooked up to it directly, feeding it all of the nutrients it needed!

You see it more commonly the other way around: in an old-growth forest, where the roots are well-established, you can find stumps where a tree was cut down a century ago... but if you scrape the stump it's still green wood. The tree's still alive, without a single leaf. Because all the other trees in the forest are feeding it.

I promised to talk about matriarch trees, so here's where we get to them.

In a very old forest, you have very old trees. You have some trees that are so very, very old, their own roots cover entire regions of the forest. Their leaves reach up to the sky over everyone else. And after so long, they've developed to where they can take in way more resources than they need.

So what do they do?

They feed baby trees.

Baby saplings in an old forest can't reach up to the sun. There's no light down there. And their roots are too small and shallow to dig down to the nutrients they need. So the matriarch tree will draw energy from its towering canopy, and nutrients from its massive, ancient roots, and feed them to the little trees that are too small to feed themselves. For anything she can't get on her own, she'll act as a central hub, taking in spare resources from the rest of the forest and giving them to the little ones.

And one of the best parts - she won't just do it for her own species. She'll connect to all kinds of trees, because they're all necessary for the ecosystem to work. She'll adopt the whole forest's children.

Sometimes in forests you'll find a spot where there are a lot of small trees in an open space around an old, fallen tree. People generally assume they could find more light there, or maybe the soil's more fertile from the decomposition.

But no.

matriarch trees:

This is getting rambly, but I'm having a train of thought, so let's follow it.

Evolution is a process involving millions of organisms spread across time and space and any organism's ability to personally outcompete everything around it has far less weight than the ability of everything around it that shares its genes to survive on average.

In moral philosophy, the Original Position is a thought experiment created by John Rawls asking you to design a society without knowing what role in that society you will fill. Since you might end up at the bottom of the class structure, you would be incentivized to structure things such that those at the bottom still have it pretty good.

A tree's DNA does not know what will happen to the tree over its life. It could be the tree on the right or the tree on the left. It's evolutionarily advantageous for trees to naturally help other trees even though that costs them some of their own nutrients because the trees that are helped put down seeds and reproduce and they're the same tree, archetypally, the tree on the left and the tree on the right started from practically identical seeds and either is equally capable of passing on the pattern of "tree which helps other trees."

It means "fit" like THIS:

Or in other words, an organism's survival is dependent on how "fit" it is for its environment.

In the right environment, anything can be an advantage. Being strong or smart can be a detriment—a big brain and big muscles take up a lot of energy to sustain.

Furthermore, competition between two species doesn't always (or even usually) drive one of the species to extinction. Competition drives adaptation.

If there are two species of seed-eating birds that rely on the same resources to survive, it doesn't mean one of them will go extinct. It often means that they will both evolve more specific preferences in seeds they like to eat, and when, and where, so they don't have to compete anymore.

This is how you get species that occupy hyperspecific niches where they only eat the leaves of one single plant, or something.

Anyway, trees:

We are discovering more and more that the classic view of nature as made of individual organisms competing for their own interests is misleading.

70-90% of all land plants form symbiotic relationships with fungi that live on their roots. In many cases, the fungal hyphae literally penetrate inside the plant cells to exchange nutrients and resources with them.

The mycorrhizal network, as it is called, links every tree in a forest. Basically every tree is linked to multiple species of fungi, and many fungi link to many species of tree. The mycorrhizal network allows nutrients and chemical signals to move between trees. Using their connection to the network, some trees can survive in completely dry soil by linking to fungi that get water by breaking down ROCKS.

And this symbiosis is OLD. It's so old, that the earliest fossils of land plants, from 400 million years ago, are attached to seemingly identical fungi to the ones that form symbiosis with plants now.

Suzanne Simard, one of the main researchers of mycorrhizal networks, coined the term "Mother Tree" to refer to the very old trees that support young trees via the mycorrhizal network. She picked this anthropomorphic language intentionally—to challenge our understanding of trees. They communicate. They sense and respond to their environment. They engage in behaviors. And yes, one of those behaviors appears to be parental care.

You think of yourself as an individual, but you could not survive without the teeming multitudes of microbes that live in and on you. Your cells contain mitochondria that have their own DNA, relics of a time when they were their own individual organisms.

Lichens, as you probably know, are a symbiosis between at least two organisms, a fungus, an alga, and sometimes microbes of other types (I forget which). They are their own distinct organism made of multiple very different organisms working together.

It is becoming more and more helpful to view forests as enormous super-organisms with collective interests and a high level of coordination.

The fact is that trees thrive around other trees. Most tree species seriously suffer alone. It is ideal for most trees to live as part of a forest.

The very nature of a forest is far more cooperative and interconnected than the old models can do justice to. A deciduous forest redistributes a HUGE amount of nutrients every year when leaves fall to the ground. Every tree feeds the other trees. Nothing is wasted. Arguably, trees regularly engage in matriphagy. Soft, crumbly decomposing wood is an ideal substrate for sprouting young trees. When I'm in the forest and need to sample some mycelium-rich dirt, I find a large dead tree and dig right around its base. When a tree dies, the mycelium flourish right around the base of the tree; decomposers break the old tree down into rich, fertile soil.

Landscaping and lawn care forums and websites cause me pain, because the average person is so eager to wildly overwater, overfertilize, and generally over-manage their backyard in the mistaken belief that "too much competition with other plants" is the problem with every plant.

Very barren, empty environments (like overmanaged lawns) are very extreme. The term "Extremophile" is subjective and relative to human preferences, but I can make a pretty good case that dandelions, crabgrass and other plants that flourish as lawn weeds are extremophiles.

The fluctuations in temperature and moisture, extreme soil compaction, and absence of a healthy mycelium network in the soil in a manicured lawn makes conditions incredibly harsh. Most plants cannot handle being blasted from leaf to root with sunlight all day with 0 shade from other plants, and growing in soil with no other plant roots. Most plants cannot thrive without the shelter, nutrients, and cooperation that a community of plants provides.