Bad Newts: Amphibians are in Serious Trouble
My colleagues and I have just had a paper published in Nature, based on our efforts to assess almost all amphibian species for the IUCN Red Lists. The major takeaway messages:
It is a bad time to be an amphibian
Two fifths of all amphibians are threatened with extinction.
Salamanders are the most threatened group; three fifths of all salamanders are threatened with extinction!
Climate change is a major driver of amphibian declines globally
Habitat loss, especially due to agriculture, is a problem for the vast majority of amphibians
Chytrid pandemics have caused and continue to cause catastrophic declines of both salamanders and frogs
Protected areas and careful management are working as strategies! They are actively improving the outlook of some species
As many as 222 amphibian species may have gone extinct in recent times; of those, 185 are suspected extinct but not yet confirmed.
Our paper is Open Access, you can read it here!
Photo of Atelopus hoogmoedi by Jaime Culebras, used with permission
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art for the first chapter of my fic!!! link [here]... -pokes my fingers together-
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My laptop breaking after I post about James being bad in bed. Coincidence? I think not.
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what's the threshold theory
There was a post about how Tom is the only crew member who isn't really affected by the Borg, and there's a theory that he has so much luck because he saw the past and the future when he crossed the transwarp threshold. He saw the past and the future, all of time and space. There's some subconscious part of him that remembers that experience. In fact, Tom refused to play a part in Chakotay indulging Annorax's temporal incursions, probably because a part of him knew nothing good could come of it.
If we extend that same theory to Janeway, some of her wild luck with time travel and other crack plans starts to make sense. She doesn't verbally hate time travel until after the events of Threshold, since it happens in Time and Again without complaint. Janeway has an uncanny knack for time travel, as evidenced every time she deals with it. She hates time travel, but it might be because part of her knows exactly how to manipulate the timeline. She manages to avoid the "inevitable" temporal explosion in Future's End, saving both Voyager and Braxton. She resets the entire timeline in Year of Hell, and no one else followed her reasoning. She pulled it off flawlessly. In Relativity, she senses the incidents are all related, despite it being just one reading that connects them. By the time she's involved, she has a temporal incursion factor of .0036 and a time travel protocol named after her, even if that may just be Braxton's personal grudge. Then there's Endgame, where she intentionally changes the timeline. Up until this point, she has been dragged into time travel, but for the first time, she jumps in on purpose. How does Admiral Janeway know how to get them home sooner in a way that completely avoids the Temporal Integrity Commission? It's because she has seen all of time, and part of her knows exactly what needs to happen so she can get Voyager home and do it in a way that becomes baked into the prime timeline. Maybe she doesn't consciously remember what happened during her transformation, but the experience lives in her mind somewhere, guiding her decisions.
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so what about one of those "jon was in the mechanisms in college and martin is currently a huge fan" jmart fics except we have an alternative/punk martin and for whatever's reason wore his battle vest/jacket to the archives and jon is so close to reprimanding martin for "inappropriate workplace attire" (the hypocrite) but then he sees the extremely detailed and lovingly hand-made mechanisms backpatch as the vest's centerpiece and he just,,, freezes and walks back to his office.
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Me when I'm writing a meta about Snape's death and realize that when Voldemort summoned him for the last time, he probably knew he was going to die and was thinking about how, from the very beginning, it was his fate to be killed in the Shrieking Shack:
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honestly i hate how that “maybe the curtains are just blue” post has become shorthand for anti-intellectualism and shit bc as someone who has an utter passion for media analysis now, I WAS THAT PERSON IN HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH CLASS.
english class never taught me how to analyze stories, it taught me how to remember what things the teacher said were “symbolism” and how to take quizzes where we had to match a quote to the character who said it. i didn’t give a shit about any of it, bc literally why should i. it was bullshit.
there’s this idea online that people are forgetting or rejecting what they learned in english class when they’re bad at media analysis, and maybe that’s a little bit true, but i think the much bigger problem is they never learned it in the first place. cinemasins & “maybe the curtains are just blue” aren’t convincing people to abandon an intellectualism they already had, they’re filling a void.
when all you learn in high school is to write on the test “blue = depression”, why is it surprising that so many people don’t give a shit about the curtains.
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todays herbarium story: new fucking way of dating things to confuse future archivists. someone wrote 66-1-3 as the date on a specimen. obviously i assumed 66 was the year and either the day was January 3rd or March 1st. put “1966” for the year in the file, marked as needing confirmation.
anyway one of the historical archivists went back and used the guys name to figure out about what month he confirmed it? and it was fucking 1866. the guy who cataloged it died in 1920.
i inadvertently handled a specimen thats older literally everyone i know and love and my only thought was mild irritation because it was dated weird.
we still dont know if it was found in January or March.
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