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Bovine figure of the day: Lisa Larson Glass Bison

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Y’all mind if I rebrand as a sustainable built environment blog?

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"A tribal-led nonprofit is creating a network of native bison ranchers that are restoring ecosystems on the Great Plains, restoring native ranchers’ connections with their ancestral land, and restoring the native diet that their ancestors relied on.

Called the Tanka Fund, they coordinate donors and partners to help ranchers secure grazing land access, funds needed to install and repair fencing, increase their herd sizes, and access markets for bison meat across the country.

That’s the human part of the story. But as Dawn Sherman, executive director of the Tanka Fund, told Native Sun News, they’re “buffalo people” and these four-legged, 2,000 lbs. “cousins” are equal-part-protagonists.

The return of the bison means the return of the prairie, one of the three great grassland ecosystems on the planet, of which just 1% remains as it was when the Mayflower arrived.

“Bringing buffalo back to their ancestral homelands is essential to restoring the ecosystem. We know that the buffalo is a keystone species,” said Dawn Sherman, a member of the Lakota, Delaware, Shawnee, and Cree.

“Bringing the buffalo back to the land and to our people, helps restore the ecosystem and everything it supports from the animals to the plants to the people. It’s come full circle. That’s how we see it.”

As Sherman and the Tanka Fund help native ranchers grow their operations, everyone is well aware of the power of the bison to transform the environment: just as nations across Europe are, who are reintroducing wood bison to various ecosystems, for all the same reasons.

Sherman points out the variety of ways in which buffalo anchor the prairie ecosystem. The almost-extinct black-footed ferret, she points out, lived symbiotically with the bison, and with the latter gone, the former followed—nearly.

The long-billed curlew uses bison dung as a disguise to hide nests from predators. Deer, pronghorn antelope, and elk all rely on bison to plow through deep snows and uncover the grasses that these smaller animals can’t reach.

Everywhere the bison hurls its massive body, life springs in the beast’s wake. When bison roll about on the plains, it creates depressions known as wallows. These fill with rainwater and create enormous puddles where amphibians and insects thrive and reproduce. Certain plants evolved to grow in the wet conditions of the wallows which Native Americans harvested for food and medicine.

Native plants evolved under the trampling hooves of millions of bison, and that constant tamping down of the Earth is a key necessity in the spreading of native wildflower seed.

Indeed, Sherman says some of these native ranchers are bringing bison onto lands still visibly affected by the Dust Bowl, and already the animals are acting like a giant wooly cure-all for the land’s ills.

Since 2020, the Tanka Fund, in partnership with the Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council and the Nature Conservancy, has overseen the transfer of 2,300 bison from Nature Conservancy reserves to lands managed by ranchers within the Tanka Fund network.

“[T]he more animals that we can get the more of that prairie we can restore,” said Sherman. “We can help restore the land that has been plowed and has been leased out to cattle ranchers.”"

-Article via Good News Network, February 13, 2025. Video via Tanka Fund, July 17, 2024.

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hiii i worked with a wild bison roundup in october and came across ur blog i think you would appreciate this baby bison

SO CUTE. i am sobbing

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Yesssss new tiny knifefish species described from Brazil, everyone say hello Microsternarchus javieri

Shamelessly copying and pasting from the Fish In The News facebook page:

𝑀𝑖𝑐𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ𝑢𝑠 𝑗𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑟𝑖, a new species of weakly electric knifefish is described from the flooded savanna streams of the Branco River and in terra-firme streams in the mid-and lower portions of the Negro River basin, Amazonas, Brazil.

Open-access - https://www.scielo.br/j/aa/a/4hGwQYNxjyGgpQP5XJF73Ft/

𝗥𝗲����𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲

𝑀𝑖𝑐𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ𝑢𝑠 𝑗𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑟𝑖, a new species of weakly electric fish (Gymnotiformes: Hypopomidae, Microsternarchini) from the Negro River basin, Amazonas, Brazil

𝗖𝗶𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻

ESCAMILLA PINILLA, C., COX FERNANDES, C., & ALVES-GOMES, J. A.. (2025). 𝑀𝑖𝑐𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ𝑢𝑠 𝑗𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑟𝑖, a new species of weakly electric fish (Gymnotiformes: Hypopomidae, Microsternarchini) from the Negro River basin, Amazonas, Brazil. Acta Amazonica, 55, e55bc24175. https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-4392202401751

𝗔𝗯𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁

Here we describe a new hypopomid species, 𝑀𝑖𝑐𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ𝑢𝑠 𝑗𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑟𝑖i n. sp., encountered in flooded savanna streams of the Branco River and in terra-firme streams in the mid-and lower portions of the Negro River basin. We compared this new species with 𝑀. 𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑠 from the San Bartolo River, Venezuela, and M. brevis from the upper portion of the Negro River.

We also compared this new species with two recently described species in the genus 𝑀𝑖𝑐𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ𝑢𝑠, 𝑀. 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑠 and 𝑀. 𝑠𝑐ℎ𝑜𝑛𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑛𝑖. We examined morphometrics, anatomical characters, DNA barcode distances for the COI (cytochrome C oxidase subunit I) gene, and electric organ discharge (EOD) parameters. We diagnosed 𝑀. 𝑗𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑟𝑖 n.sp. based on variation in maximum body depth, eye diameter, caudal vertebral counts, number of anal fin rays, and the shape of the maxillae. The average intra-specific genetic distance (K2P) in 𝑀. 𝑗𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑟𝑖 n.sp. was 0.83%, whereas the average inter-specific genetic distance to 𝑀. 𝑏𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑠 was 12.45%, and to other hypopomids ranged from 17.21 to 21.54%. When comparing EOD waveforms of the new species with 𝑀. 𝑏𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑠, we found differences in repetition rate, the ratio between the first and second phase areas, and the polarity balance.

The description of 𝑀. 𝑗𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑟𝑖 n. sp. increases to five the number of species in the genus.

𝗘𝘁𝘆𝗺𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆

The specific epithet, 𝑗𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑟𝑖, is in honor of the late Javier Maldonado Ocampo, whose research on gymnotiforms, systematics, and conservation greatly contributed to our understanding of the Neotropical ichthyofauna. A masculine noun in apposition.

𝗣𝗵𝗼𝘁𝗼 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝘁

Lateral view of 𝑀𝑖𝑐𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ𝑢𝑠 𝑗𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑟𝑖 n. sp. from the Negro River basin. A - Holotype (INPA-ICT 060886), 98.6 mm TL, 67.6 mm LEA; B - Paratype (ANSP 212283), 101.2 mm TL, 62.0 mm LEA; C -Non-type (INPA-ICT 28591), 86.9 mm TL, 60.4 mm LEA live specimen.

Copyright © 2025 the Author(s). Published in Acta Amazonica journal. This paper is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

#NewSpeciesAlert #NewSpecies #Ichthyology #Ictiology #Taxonomy #Biodiversity #Aquarium #AquariumHobby #Fishkeeping #Fishkeeper #Aquarist #Knifefish #ElectricFishes #ElectricFish #WeaklyElectricFish #Microsternarchus #Gymnotiformes #Hypopomidae #Microsternarchini #Amazonas #Neotropical #NeotropicalFishes #NegroRiver #RioNegro #Gymnotiforms #Systematics

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Bovine figure of the day: Ebros Gift Store Prancing Bison

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added a little blue shading on the bison and it suddenly made it feel like dawn lighting. like the bison is stepping out of the shade and into the early morning sunlight

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Saw a band called undead fishermen last night

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prairie madness

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My professor said that trees are non vascular plants in the recorded lecture so now I gotta email him 😭 non vascular plants are like moss and stuff

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If you have the skills to memorize dozens of plants and their growing conditions maybe use that to support rewilding instead of the exotic pet industry

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We should hype up dental care routines more instead of skincare routines

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"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

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*picking up all the dirty clothes on my floor* aquascaping

Pretending I’m an abused betta fish in a tiny unheated unfiltered tank so that I will take care of me

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