#Arid Environment

[multisnapshott]

How Cactus Plants Survive with Little to No Water

Here’s an image of a cactus in a desert, illustrating its water-storing stem, spines, and waxy cuticle. Cacti are some of the most remarkable plants on Earth, thriving in extreme desert environments where water is scarce. Their ability to survive with little to no water is due to a combination of unique adaptations that have evolved over time. Let’s explore the key strategies cacti use to…

[canisalbus]

I was in a road trip in Arizona, it was nighttime and I was looking out the window. I tried to think about just random stuff to let the time pass, but then I started to dream of a scenario where Vasco went over to Machete's grave, he was grieving and pretty much just talking to the grave about how there could've been some way to save him, or that he will never see him again, and stuff like he lost a piece of himself and how he would honor him. It was very emotional but that was the only thing I thought about for like 20 minutes until he ended his conversation and left

I've been thinking about this a little bit, and I'm not quite sure how easy it would be for Vasco to visit Machete's grave, to be honest. As a high ranking member of the clergy he'd most likely be entombed in a crypt underneath one of Rome's hundreds of churches, maybe one that held some kind of significance for him. As a secular citizen with no family relations to him, I'd imagine it could be challenging for Vasco to gain access to such a private and sacred space, at least unless he managed to pull some strings. But then again, I'm just theoretizing. He could and would still visit the church that stands above it.

[one-real-wrimonkey]

Just a fun reminder for people designing Vacuo outfits for RWBY and Co that in most hot, arid environments it’s best to cover skin to protect it from sun and sand.

Consider long and flowing components, materials like linen, light and breathable but protective against the elements. And lighter colours to reflect the heat instead of absorbing it.

[velvetwyrms]

Heya folks! Please specify in the comments which one works best, not just the range, otherwise this poll isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do 😅 thank you!

[hirazuki]

I was casually toying with the idea of writing some FMA:B fic because the hyperfixation is strong and (as usual) no one has fics that scratch my specific itch, when I realized that:

My thing in Bleach is Hueco Mundo

One of my things in Naruto is Sasori

My thing in FMA is the war in Ishval

Huh.

[xxf0rg0tt3n-b3st14xx]

Made a mineshaft looking entrance.

I'm pretty happy with it. The only thing is that you can now see the water a bit, which looks a little off.

[number1villainstan]

been playing jedi: survivor for the first time (not finished yet, no spoilers plz) and while i'm loving most of it there's one thing i really hate and that's its little tHeRe'S nO LiFe iN tHe dEseRt schtick. bitch i LIVE in the desert, i've been to lots of deserts, THERE'S LIFE EVERYWHERE IN THE DESERT. PUT SOME GODDAMN RESPECT ON MY ENVIRONMENT.

[puppy-faggot]

Going from a place that gets rain every 100 days *maybe* to a place that gets frequent rain is crazy. Like WHY IS IT WET AGAIN? YOU MEAN THE WET HAPPENS REGULARLY??? TF???

[assistant-honcho]

Many people don't spend much time outside. I probably only see a bug indoors less than once a day on average, and even then it's just a fly most of the time. So if you don't get out much then seeing a wasp or spider could be a truly rare occurance.

at mamaws america's funniest home videos was on and there were like 10 separate videos of adults seeing a single insect and fully just screaming at the top of their lungs, running around flailing and throwing objects (plus multiple of people having the same reaction to a small animal like a frog or lizard), including one of a couple who almost wrecked their car because a bug was inside it

It's actually kind of terrifying that there are people growing up in environments with so few bugs that the energy expenditure of this behavioral response isn't untenable. If I did that every time I saw a bug, I would be hospitalized from exhaustion by noon

I don't judge people that have phobias, it just seems like it would be very rare for a phobia of bugs that severe to develop in an environment that wasn't poisoned in every square centimeter.

[journeytojaburo]

The argama's descent to earth seemed a lot more planned than some other times so why were they sent out so unprepared 😭

[conjcosby]

Stardate: 2024.4.15 ▫ No matter how harsh or extreme, one way or another there is always something green. 💚🙏 #Green #Tree #Trees #Bush #Bushes ##Harsh #Extreme #Sand #Dunes #SandDunes #Environment #World #Earth #Desert #Remote #Erg #Climate #Wadi #Plant #AridClimate #Nature #PicOfTheDay #PictureOfTheDay #PhotoOfTheDay #PostOfTheDay #POTD

[nationalvyvanseshortage]

I think what Horizon Forbidden West has taught me is that I enjoy when games are set in deserts and do not like when games are set in places that are not deserts.

[kuramirocket]

Mexican scientist, Gerardo Ceballos, winner of the 16th edition BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards in Ecology and Conservation Biology

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology has gone in this sixteenth edition to two Mexican scientists who have documented and quantified the scale of the Sixth Mass Extinction, that is, the massive loss of biodiversity brought about by human activity. Gerardo Ceballos (National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM) and Rodolfo Dirzo (Stanford University) are hailed by the committee as “trailblazing researchers in ecological science and conservation,” whose joint work in Latin America and Africa “has established that current species extinction rates in many groups of organisms are much higher than throughout the preceding two million years.” In effect, by documenting losses of animals and plants in some of the Earth’s most biodiverse habitats, both have contributed to showing that today’s biodiversity crisis is, as the citation states, “an especially rapid period of species loss occurring globally and across all groups of organisms, and the first to be tied directly to the impacts of a single species, namely, us.”

The two awardee ecologists have catalyzed the global study of “defaunation,” a term Dirzo coined to describe the alterations causing the disappearance of animals in the structure and function of ecosystems. His research, says the citation, has revealed how the elimination of a single species can trigger pernicious “cascading effects” by disrupting the web of interactions it maintains with other organisms. This, in turn, has adverse effects on human wellbeing through the reduction of the goods and services they perform. His work has helped provide the “necessary scientific basis” to further the adoption of evidence-led conservation measures.

“The experimental work done by professors Ceballos and Dirzo has led the way in quantifying the extent of species loss,” explains a Research Professor in the Department of Integrative Ecology at Doñana Biological Station (CSIC) and secretary of the award committee. “And what is truly shocking about their results is that this species extinction rate, or ‘defaunation process’, as it is known, is advancing today at a speed several orders of magnitude above the rate recorded over the last two million years. This shows that we are up against a truly intimidating challenge; one that these two researchers have documented and assessed across thousands of vertebrate, invertebrate and plant species.”

Another committee member, a Research Professor in the Department of Biogeography and Global Change at the National Museum of Natural Sciences (CSIC) in Madrid, uses an analogy to highlight the importance of the awardees' work: “Imagine we are flying in a plane sitting next to the window. And looking out, we see bits of the plane falling off. It may not nosedive straight away, but the first thought that crosses the passenger’s mind is: how long can this plane keep flying without its component parts? Something similar occurs with ecosystems. As they lose their “parts'' or species, they also lose vital functions, and it is these functions that provide essential services. The work of Dirzo and Ceballos is a valuable addition to the understanding of how such losses affect the resilience and sustainability of our ecosystems, shedding light on the urgent need for conservation actions to preserve the integrity of these systems that are critical to our survival.”

An accelerating extinction rate driven by our own species

Ceballos and Dirzo's endeavors have advanced in tandem through most of their professional careers, with results in many cases complementing one another’s. But the origin of their collaboration lies back in the early 1980s, when both were studying at the University of Wales (United Kingdom), Dirzo pursuing his doctorate courses and Ceballos completing his master’s degree. They first connected over their shared concern at the increasingly evident impact on nature of human activity. “We started having conversations not just on scientific matters, but about how worried we were about the anthropogenic impact on the natural world we were seeing all around us,” Dirzo recalls.

Further ahead, Ceballos turned his research attention to the study of wildlife and the magnitude of the advancing extinction, while Dirzo centered his efforts on ecological interactions between plants and animals, and the consequences of this extinction.

Ceballos’ work on assessing current rates of extinction led him to explore comparisons with the rates of the past. “Evolution operates as a process of species extinction and generation,” he relates. In normal periods, more species appear than disappear, such that diversity gradually expands. There have been five mass extinction events in the last 600 million years, the last of which brought the demise of the dinosaurs. All had in common that they were catastrophic – wiping out 70% or more of the world’s species – had their origins in natural disasters, like a meteorite collision, and were extremely rapid in geological terms, lasting hundreds of thousands or millions of years.”

After a detailed analysis of numerous species, a research team led by Ceballos concluded – in a paper published in Science Advances in 2015 – that vertebrate extinction rates are from 100 to 1,000 times greater than those prevailing over the last few million years. “What this means is that the vertebrate species that have died out in the past 100 years should have taken 10,000 years to become extinct. That is the magnitude of the extinction,” he explains. His work pointed one way only; to the fact that the sixth mass extinction was already upon us, a scenario that for Ceballos has three major implications: “The first is that we are losing all that biological history. The second is that we are losing living creatures that have accompanied us through time and have been key in driving forward human evolution. And the third is that all these species are assembled in ecosystems that provide us with the environmental services that support life on Earth, like the right combination of gases in the atmosphere, drinking water, fertilization… Without these environmental services civilization as we know it cannot be sustained.”

The grave impact of extinction on ecosystem services

Species extinction is the last stage in the process, but Ceballos insists that population extinction is no less worrying, since it is these populations that provide environmental services on a local or regional scale. He gives an example: “It doesn’t matter if there are jaguars in Brazil if they have died out in Mexico, because the environmental services they performed in Mexico will have disappeared with them.”

Ceballos and his colleagues explored this concept in a study of prairie dog populations, which in the 1990s were thought to be pests and were the target of eradication campaigns. Through this study, published in 1999 in the Journal of Arid Environments, they were able to prove that, rather than pests, they actually play a vital role in maintaining their ecosystem, the grasslands of the southwest of the United States and north of Mexico.

“We found that prairie dogs were essential to the upkeep of ecosystem services, because if they are lost it sets off a chain of extinctions across the many other species who depend on them.” With these rodents gone, the soil becomes less fertile, erosion increases and the scrubland advances, wiping out the plants that serve as forage for livestock. “The impact on environmental services is colossal,” he affirms.

For the Mexican ecologist, the biodiversity crisis we are experiencing is of a magnitude similar to the crisis of climate change and both problems are closely interrelated: “We have to couple the issue of species extinction with the issue of climate change, and understand that it is a threat to humanity’s future.”

From deforestation to “defaunation”: the “cascading effect” of species loss

Rodolfo Dirzo states, "I was soon asking myself: these fascinating things I study, the ecology and evolution of plants and animals and their interactions, may not be around to study in future if we don’t start to do something about what is happening to natural systems.” This concern, which he shares with Ceballos, has guided Dirzo’s steps throughout his career, from Mexico to the United States.

By analogy with deforestation, he came up with the term “defaunation” to refer to the imbalance entailed by the absence of animals. “Everyone has a mental picture when they hear the word deforestation. They understand that what they are seeing is a problem, the erosion of ecosystems due to loss of vegetation. And it occurred to me that the word “defaunation” could be a way to highlight that, just as Earth’s ecosystems face a serious problem of deforestation, another serious threat lies in the depletion and possible extinction of animal species.”

The scientist began studying the effects of this phenomenon and published his findings in a chapter of the book Plant-Animal Interactions: Evolutionary Ecology in Tropical and Temperate Regions in 1991.

“Species do not live in an ecological vacuum,” he points out, insisting that it is not just species disappearances we have to worry about, but the extinction of species populations and, above all, species interactions, which should accordingly be a core focus of conservation actions.

Elephant poaching and the risk of pandemics

These effects, Dirzo explains, give rise to a phenomenon that he refers to as “winners and losers.” When these large animals die out locally, they are evidently losers, while smaller animals like rodents take advantage of their absence and therefore become winners. But these smaller animals also carry pathogens like Leptospira, Leishmania and even the bacteria that causes bubonic plague. So if populations of these pathogen-carrying animals increase, there is a greater chance that they will transmit diseases to humans. “We could be put at risk of suffering a new pandemic,” he affirms, “given the proliferation of these diseases and the current mobility of human beings.”

The researcher has verified these effects through experiments carried out in Africa. He and his team installed electrified fences in some very well-conserved parts of the savannah to stop large animals from entering. They then left other areas unfenced, so they could compare two identical ecosystems, one with large wildlife and one without. “We found that when an area is closed off to these animals, the savannah vegetation changes dramatically.” Further, the rodent population triples, as does the risk of diseases that can be transmitted to humans. In this way, he says, we get “a cascade that runs from elephant poaching to the real risk of a new human pandemic.”

In fact, it is not even necessary for a whole local population to die out for it to pose an ecological problem. If there are not enough individuals to maintain viable populations, the species in question can no longer interact with other organisms and fulfill its ecosystem function. It becomes what is known, says Dirzo, as a “living dead species.”

Hunting is just one human activity that can drive species populations totally or partially extinct and trigger such grave effects as a pandemic. Dirzo lists five key factors that drive defaunation: land use change for pasture or urban development; the overexploitation of resources; pollution – by anything from noxious chemical products to marine plastic waste; the introduction of non-native or invasive species in ecosystems where they don’t belong; and climate change. “But none of these five factors,” he adds, “operates in isolation: they are all interlinked, and this makes the challenge of dealing with biological extinction all the more complex.”

Laureate bio notes

Gerardo Ceballos (Toluca, Mexico, 1958) graduated in biology from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa (Mexico) and went on to earn master’s degrees from the University of Wales (United Kingdom) and the University of Arizona (United States), where he received his PhD in 1988. The following year, he took up a position at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he is currently a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Ecology. He is the author of 55 books and numerous scientific papers, and some 200 applied studies in conservation and management that have featured in technical reports supported by institutions like the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development or the State of Mexico Government. He is one of the forces behind Mexico’s endangered species legislation and the designation of over 20 natural protected areas covering more than 1.5 million hectares.

Rodolfo Dirzo (Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1951) completed a BSc in Biology at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (Mexico) then went on to obtain an MSc and PhD from the University of Wales (United Kingdom). Between 1980 and 2004 he held various teaching and research positions at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), serving as a professor, Director of the Los Tuxtlas Biological Station and Chair of the Department of Evolutionary Ecology. In 2004 he joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he is currently Bing Professor in Environmental Science, Professor of Earth System Science, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Associate Dean for Integrative Initiatives in Environmental Justice. Dirzo has also taught in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Puerto Rico.

Nominators

A total of 47 nominations were received in this edition. The awardee researchers were nominated by Gretchen Cara Daily, Bing Professor of Environmental Science at Stanford University (United States) and 2018 Frontiers of Knowledge Laureate in Ecology and Conservation Biology.

[artifacts-and-arthropods]

Giant Antlions (Palpares immensus): these enormous antlions have been known to attack geckos and other small reptiles

The images above depict the larval stage of Palpares immensus, which is one of the largest antlion species in the world.

This article provides more information about the unusual behavior of this species:

The larvae live freely in sand and are ambush hunters. They are voracious predators and feed mainly on other arthropods, but have been known to attack geckos and, in one case a small adder. They are unable to feed on these reptiles and usually die as a result of not being able to extract their jaws from the vertebrate prey.

These antlions can be found in sandy, arid environments throughout southern Africa.

The adult form of Palpares immensus is also depicted in the images below:

Sources & More Info:

Biodiversity and Development Institute: Palpares immensus

Global Biodiversity Information Facility: P. immensus

Animal Life: Giant Antlion Larva

What's That Bug?: Uncovering Antlion Habitats

[entelodante]

Styraphant ethnicity BIG POST! Basically just going over the main 'flavors' that all styraphants kind of fall into. More detail below the cut!

They can all interbreed and are the same species, but have a lot more genetic variation than human populations on Earth! There are about 6 main 'morphs', but that being said individuals with varied lineages may be a little hard to pin down. When in doubt the shape of ones crest is where most will look when trying to assume! Because that IS where most of the variation resides. Big list inbound.

Star. These are the dudes I've been drawin so far. They tend to inhabit around the center of their planets largest continent, in the more tropical zones. So like to live in wooded areas and lush vegetation.

Flame. These guys are named for the upswept tines on their crest. They are the most Northernly, enjoying mostly temperate climates and migrating as the seasons change to avoid chillier weather.

Fan. These guys are FUN. With large webbed tines on the crests of both males and females. They are darker due to their hot, arid home, so typically built to avoid sunburn.

Scallop. These guys are named because the edges of their crested are, in fact, scalloped. They range from temperate to tropical climates, tending to stick to places on the soggier side.

Disk. These guys have completely smooth crests! They are also the smallest variety, mostly due to their more seaborne nature. They have the widest range of climates and tend to move around the most by a wide margin.

Spade. These have a spade shaped face, obviously, with two large tines pointing directly upward. They are found in the colder, Southern continent, the only variety not found on the mainland. Their thickset frame helps them put up with the cold year round.

This is the gist! They cover a wide variety of crest and body type in these groups as they are pretty different!

Most differences come from the different regions each population has settled in as I'm also thinking that they are an older species. So they've had time to become more sculpted by their environments. They get along pretty well though, like I'm thinking it's odd to not associate with each other!