#four species

[autumndragon]

i love the idea that viggo's issue is that he's always overestimating the dragon riders and that's why he loses. other antagonists always underestimate them, they don't put in all the necessary precautions, which allows the riders to slip through, always throwing parties and gloating before the dragon is in the cage. but viggo?

my man takes so many precautions, his entire island is a war base, and yet, and YET the dragon riders got in by dyeing snotlout's hair blonde, giving him gucci boots and naming him sir ulgertorpe, SIR ULGERTORPE. viggo got catfished by snotlout with blonde hair. he's overestimating them so bad that the IDEA of them "just walking in" doesn't even come to mind. he's ready for fire and death to fall from the sky but a one-legged boy pulling a fast one on him breaks his fancy little english brain.

[plesiosaurys]

getting emotional over footage of an amateur scuba diver interacting with a coelacanth. they are hunted by large deepwater predators, and here comes a large creature bearing the brightest lights it's ever seen, making strange noises, but it does not shy away. it hovers, calmly, as the diver reaches out and trails a hand down its back. im strongly against the anthropomorphizing of real life animals but the stupid emotional part of me loudly insists this is because it recognizes us, the alternating movements of its four paired limbs matching the diver's four paired limbs, & it is thinking, "hello, cousins, we missed you these 66 million years, it's so good to see you again. welcome back, welcome home."

[dazzelmethat]

Anteater Weevil. Smaller than a great anteater and more arboreal, the species combo would eat more termites and sap from trees than ants on the ground.

@weevilsdaily Hope you don't mind me tagging you. Your blog is what got me to get down and fully design an idea I've had for a while.

I love both great anteaters and weevils so so much.

[markscherz]

Meet Gephyromantis ampondo, one of four new species of frog that my colleagues and I described in a paper published this week in the journal Spixiana. We discovered this species in 2016 on a trip to the mountain of Marojejy in the northeast of Madagascar.

You can read the full paper here.

[magnetothemagnificent]

Not "shake a lemon angrily at G-d" week, but rather;

Gather a citron, an ancient fruit predating the cultivation of lemon. Notice how it has a wonderful aroma, and consider how its flesh is edible. This represents the Jew who is both learned in Judaism and who exhibits kindness and good deeds.

Now gather the closed frond at the center of a palm tree. Consider how sweet the dates of the palm taste, but how the frond exhibits no strong smell like the citron. This represents the Jew who is learned in Judaism, but who does not practice the compassion in the many texts they studied.

Now gather at least three branches from a myrtle bush. Take in the refreshing scent oozing from the branches' thick leaves, but see how it does not bear fruit. This represents the Jew who is not learned in Judaism, but whose good character and actions are exceptional.

Finally, gather two branches from the somber willow. While mighty and enveloping, the willow exhibits no strong aroma, nor does it produce fruit. This represents the Jew who is neither learned in Judaism nor kind in character and deeds.

Appreciate the various textures and shapes of these four species. Feel the weight of them in your hand. Value how different in so many aspects each of them are.

Take them all in your hands, and bind them together like an embrace. Point them in all the corners of the earth- South, North, East, heavenward, downward, and West. Think of all your Jewish brethren scattered around the world, and bring your precious bundle back to your heart with every direction you send it to. Contemplate the place of every Jew in your community, the Etrog, the Lulav, the Hadas, and the Arava, for they all belong.

This is the meaning of Sukkot: coming back to our roots and our bare essence. Erect a temporary dwelling in reminiscence of your wandering ancestors. Come together under the stars, as exposed and unguarded as when we first walked the earth. Welcome guests into your makeshift home, be they family, friends, or the spirits of founding ancestors passed. Surround yourself in your community- and bring it all back to your heart.

[icewindandboringhorror]

I made a few new wax seal stamps out of clay (like the ones I did for my worldbuilding stuff forever ago), this time just of random symbols that I thought might look good done in the style of painting over the raised part of the wax or etc. :0c Some of them aren't carved deep enough to really show up that well, but overall they worked okay for being clay lol

[boarloved-art]

Who Me? Appearing in YOUR inbox again? Wh-What....haha.....what gives my beloved spouse that impression?.... So I've been working on a Fae AU and I just need you understand the brainworms I am DEALING WITH, my beloved spouse!!! Imagine for a moment: you've got wangxian morons both thinking that the other is a human. Wei Wuxian (the beloved Summer/Spring Court Fae), who has been stowed away in the Autumn Court all his life, has never met any Fae outside of the Autumn Court, and Lan Wangji (Winter Court Fae) has met all of the other Courts apart from the Summer Court (which is basically extinct apart from Wei Wuxian) and the Spring Court (because they have isolated themself from the rest of the world) so he's like "obviously this is just a human who is using charms to gain Fae features like the humans from the Winter Court". Cue wild shenanigans where they keep bumping each other and completely believing that the other is a human so being all like "this fucking human should NOT be here, also how is this human SO PRETTY?!?! HUMANS SHOULDN'T BE PRETTIER THAN FAE!!!" while the Jiang siblings completely believe that this 'Hanguang-Jun' Winter Court human pet is trying to seduce Wei Wuxian into joining the Winter Court despite not knowing what Court he's from, and Lan Xichen (and Nie Huaisang, a Night Court Fae) completely thinks that Lan Wangji is going insane whenever he talks about this 'Yiling Laozu' human. SORRY FOR RAMBLING BUT I NEEDED TO YAPPER TO SOMEONE WHO'S NOT HEARD OF IT BEFORE. I'M HEARTBROKEN AND ALONE (/silly/silly)

OUGH THIS IS DELIGHTFUL I LOVE IT!!! THEYRE SO SILLLYYY IM OBSESSED WITH THEM!!! WANGXIAN MISUNDERSTANDINGS YOULL ALWAYS BE FAMOUS TO MEEEEE

[plutonicbees]

old news but I've been seeing ppl call johnny's alien lover a centipede and I feel that it should be known that she is literally just. hallucigenia with big eyes. human-sized hallucigenia with different head.

like if johnny ever happens to stumble across information on extinct cambrian ocean worms he'll be having some flashbacks.

[ghosted-jazz]

Studies(?) so I can draw the Nightmare Critters gang before Chapter 4 comes out

[turtleblogatlast]

One of the biggest things that makes me see Leo as trans is absolutely the size of his carapace in comparison to his brothers’.

And I’m not talking about height! I’m specifically looking at his shell here, because when you compare him to the others, particularly Donnie who is nearly the same height as Leo, it’s very clear that Leo’s carapace is much longer in proportion to the rest of his body.

Like - standing side by side, even though Donnie is shorter his carapace ends noticeably higher up than Leo’s does. And I like this not only because it really helps push the idea that Leo could very likely be trans (or intersex!), but it’s also just a fun design difference between them.

(It also lends way to future scenarios of Donnie eventually getting taller than Leo, but sitting down still has Leo being the taller one haha.)

[critter-creature-or-beast]

Submitted for classification by anonymous.

By Stefan Haag - Photo 107167442, (c) Stefan Haag, some rights reserved (CC BY), CC BY 4.0

[elgatt0]

MER FOUR!!!!

(Hawaiian bobtail squid, suggest by @indigoartistqueen )

"Mysterious Sea Creature Discovered by Scientists on the Hyrulen Coast"

Click to see the chain: Time // Twi // Wars // Sky // Hyrule // Legend // Wild // Wind // Four

Click to see the Mers!: Time // Twi // Wars //Sky // Hyrule // Legend // Wild // Wind // Four

🦑More details 🦑

Weight: 20 kg (44Ibs)

Height: 1,4 m (4,6ft)

--2 retractable arms

--In total four have 10 limbs: 6 tentacles and 4 arms

[fatehbaz]

Tallying every single tree in the kingdom. Endangered South Asian sandalwood. British war to control the forests. European companies claim the ecosystem. Failure of the plantation. Until the twentieth century, the Empire couldn't figure out how to cultivate sandalwood because they didn't understand that the plant is actually a partial root parasite, so their plantation monoculture approach of eliminating companion species was self-defeating. French perfumes and the creation of "Sandalwood City".

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Selling at about $147,000 per metric ton, the aromatic heartwood of Indian sandalwood (S. album) is arguably [among] the most expensive wood in the world. Globally, 90 per cent of the world’s S. album comes from India [...]. And within India, around 70 per cent of S. album comes from the state of Karnataka [...] [and] the erstwhile Kingdom of Mysore. [...] [T]he species came to the brink of extinction. [...] [O]verexploitation led to the sandal tree's critical endangerment in 1974. [...]

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Francis Buchanan’s 1807 A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar is one of the few European sources to offer insight into pre-colonial forest utilisation in the region. [...] Buchanan records [...] [the] tradition of only harvesting sandalwood once every dozen years may have been an effective local pre-colonial conservation measure. [...] Starting in 1786, Tipu Sultan [ruler of Mysore] stopped trading pepper, sandalwood and cardamom with the British. As a result, trade prospects for the company [East India Company] were looking so bleak that by November 1788, Lord Cornwallis suggested abandoning Tellicherry on the Malabar Coast and reducing Bombay’s status from a presidency to a factory. [...] One way to understand these wars is [...] [that] [t]hey were about economic conquest as much as any other kind of expansion, and sandalwood was one of Mysore’s most prized commodities. In 1799, at the Battle of Srirangapatna, Tipu Sultan was defeated. The kingdom of Mysore became a princely state within British India [...]. [T]he East India Company also immediately started paying the [new rulers] for the right to trade sandalwood.

British control over South Asia’s natural resources was reaching its peak and a sophisticated new imperial forest administration was being developed that sought to solidify state control of the sandalwood trade. In 1864, the extraction and disposal of sandalwood came under the jurisdiction of the Forest Department. [...] Colonial anxiety to maximise profits from sandalwood meant that a government agency was established specifically to oversee the sandalwood trade [...] and so began the government sandalwood depot or koti system. [...]

From the 1860s the [British] government briefly experimented with a survey tallying every sandal tree standing in Mysore [...].

Instead, an intricate system of classification was developed in an effort to maximise profits. By 1898, an 18-tiered sandalwood classification system was instituted, up from a 10-tier system a decade earlier; it seems this led to much confusion and was eventually reduced back to 12 tiers [...].

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Meanwhile, private European companies also made significant inroads into Mysore territory at this time. By convincing the government to classify forests as ‘wastelands’, and arguing that Europeans would improves these tracts from their ‘semi-savage state’, starting in the 1860s vast areas were taken from local inhabitants and converted into private plantations for the ‘production of cardamom, pepper, coffee and sandalwood’.

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Yet attempts to cultivate sandalwood on both forest department and privately owned plantations proved to be a dismal failure. There were [...] major problems facing sandalwood supply in the period before the twentieth century besides overexploitation and European monopoly. [...] Before the first quarter of the twentieth century European foresters simply could not figure out how to grow sandalwood trees effectively.

The main reason for this is that sandal is what is now known as a semi-parasite or root parasite; besides a main taproot that absorbs nutrients from the earth, the sandal tree grows parasitical roots (or haustoria) that derive sustenance from neighbouring brush and trees. [...] Dietrich Brandis, the man often regaled as the father of Indian forestry, reported being unaware of the [sole significant English-language scientific paper on sandalwood root parasitism] when he worked at Kew Gardens in London on South Asian ‘forest flora’ in 1872–73. Thus it was not until 1902 that the issue started to receive attention in the scientific community, when C.A. Barber, a government botanist in Madras [...] himself pointed out, 'no one seems to be at all sure whether the sandalwood is or is not a true parasite'.

Well into the early decades of twentieth century, silviculture of sandal proved a complete failure. The problem was the typical monoculture approach of tree farming in which all other species were removed and so the tree could not survive. [...]

The long wait time until maturity of the tree must also be considered. Only sandal heartwood and roots develop fragrance, and trees only begin developing fragrance in significant quantities after about thirty years. Not only did traders, who were typically just sailing through, not have the botanical know-how to replant the tree, but they almost certainly would not be there to see a return on their investments if they did. [...]

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The main problem facing the sustainable harvest and continued survival of sandalwood in India [...] came from the advent of the sandalwood oil industry at the beginning of the twentieth century. During World War I, vast amounts of sandal were stockpiled in Mysore because perfumeries in France had stopped production and it had become illegal to export to German perfumeries. In 1915, a Government Sandalwood Oil Factory was built in Mysore. In 1917, it began distilling. [...] [S]andalwood production now ramped up immensely. It was at this time that Mysore came to be known as ‘the Sandalwood City’.

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Text above by: Ezra Rashkow. "Perfumed the axe that laid it low: The endangerment of sandalwood in southern India." The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Volume 51 (2014), Issue 1, pages 41-70. First published online 10 March 2014. DOI: 10.1177/0019464613515533 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading in this post added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[thelemoncoffee]

did some doodles to force myself to draw

first time i've drawn my redesign/hc full design of Kokichi's full outfit since i made it, and it's in shitposty doodles... honestly i think Kokichi would be proud

[markscherz]

The eye of Uroplatus garamaso, the new gecko species my colleagues and I described yesterday. Check out that weird pupil! Four little diamonds in a chain.

[shrimp-and-rice]

Sketchbook dump *explosion sfx*