#mussel

Pham Van Huong is a particularly resourceful 71-year-old farmer in Vietnam.

The prairie chicken's gone. Who's next on Texas's endangered list?

The Endangered Species Act is under fire in Texas

The lesser prairie-chicken is no longer protected under federal law, and several other endangered Texas species could soon meet the same fate.  In August, a federal judge ruled in favor of the State of Texas, siding with state officials and industry groups who argued that listing the bird as endangered and threatened unlawfully restricted land use. The bird's habitat spans parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico—much of it overlapping with energy development and ranching. Attorney General Ken Paxton called the Biden-era protections "an attack" on property rights. Now, other species are on the chopping block.

Another of the places we visited for the geology, or rather the paleontology, while we were visiting the Catlins.

Curio Bay (and some 20 kilometers of the coastline here) is the site of an 180 million-year-old petrified forest, once populated by trees closely related to the living Kauri (Agathis sp.) and Norfolk Pine (Araucaria heterophylla). The forests were buried in volcanic mudslides and debris at least four times, regrowing in the millennia inbetween, and the stumps and fallen trees have been beautifully preserved on the intertidal platform.

The intertidal platform had a delightful range of species as well. Such as this mussel living inside the hollow petrified stump of a Jurassic tree.

The area is also home to the largest surviving population of yellow-eyed penguin (Megadyptes antipodes) but alas we missed seeing them coming ashore in the evening, despite heading to the viewing platform at dusk.

On the other side of the road a forest featuring as many plants as might have been found in the Petrified Forest when it was alive has been planted. At least these days it's unlikely to be buried in volcanic mud, unless something has gone extremely wrong.