#nonnative fish

[floridafishkeeper]

Sometimes you're climbing around in tunnels under the highway and you find The Horde. A writhing mass of walking catfish, brown hoplo catfish, and snow queen plecostomus. All invasive here in Florida. I managed to score two hoplo catfish, hoplosternum litorale, for my cichlid tank.

[bogleech]

Simple lifeform facts I take for granted that I've now seen blowing people's minds on here:

That sea urchins walk around and have mouths with teeth on their undersides

That corals are related to jellyfish

Barnacles being related to crabs and shrimp

Ants being an offshoot of wasps

Termites being totally unrelated to ants and all similarities just being convergent evolution (they're actually a group of cockroaches, but even science didn't know that part until a few years ago)

Starfish having an eye at the end of each arm

That the bodies of ticks and mites are also their heads, essentially big heads with legs (they even frequently have eyes way up on "the body")

Sperm whales have no upper teeth, and also their bodies are flat from the front

Goats also having no upper (front) teeth

Tapeworms having no mouth at all and just absorbing nutrients over their entire body surface

That flies are bigger pollinators than bees

That moths are bigger pollinators than bees

That wasps are just as important pollinators as bees (more important to many groups of plants) and when we say they're "less efficient" at it we just mean individually they get a little less pollen stuck to them.

That honeybees are nonnative to most of the world and not good for the local ecosystem, just good for human agriculture

That earthworms are also nonnative and destructive to more habitats than the reverse

There being no hard biological line between slugs and snails; all slugs aren't necessarily related to each other and there are gastropod groups where some have shells and some don't

That ALL octopuses (not just the blue ring) have a venomous bite

Most jellyfish and sea anemones being predators that eat fish

"Krill" being shrimp up to a few inches long and not some kind of microbe

Blue whales therefore being the deadliest predators to ever evolve as they eat up to several million individual animals per day

That krill are still "plankton" because plankton refers to whatever animals, algae and other organisms are carried around by the sea's currents, not to any particular group of life or a size category

Fungi being no more related to plants than we are, and in fact more like a sibling to the animal kingdom if anything

Venus fly traps being native to only one small area of North America in all the world

Parasites being essential to all ecosystems

Leeches not having a circular ring of teeth anywhere

That algae is not a type of plant

That most seaweed is just very big algae

That enough wood ends up in the ocean that plenty of sea life evolved to eat only wood

Speaking of which the fact that the "ship worms" that make tunnels in wood are just long noodly clams

Butterflies technically just being a small weird group of moths we gave a different name to

That insects only get wings once they reach maximum size and therefore there can never be a younger smaller bee or fly that's not a larva

Spiders not being any more likely to kill their own mates/young than just a cat or dog might, for most species maybe a lot less often?

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

I’m glad you liked the pictures and facts :) Maretarium is so amazing!! Everyone should know about it I think

Also silly me, the fish with the pike is actually a common bream 🤦 I’ve had too many moments where I’ve mistakenly called a carp a bream or a bream a carp! Something I need to practice at. Took me a bit to look at the picture again and go, “hmm, no… that’s not right…” ^^’

I need a shirt that says “Ask me about the Helsinki Natural History Museum” or perhaps “Ask me about Maretarium” because besides fish those are the two things I consistently keep talking about all the time I feel sifjskfnskgmwkgamgnskvnskfm

I need to post more about them. You people don’t even know. You have no idea about the things that are in there

[hope-for-the-planet]

Usually, sharks don't have much interest in lionfish--this is due partially to their venomous spines, but also to the fact that the sharks don't recognize the nonnative fish as prey. The lack of predation by native predators like sharks is part of what makes lionfish such a damaging invasive species.

However, sharks became more interested after spearfishermen working to cull invasive lionfish started feeding the fish they were killing to nearby sharks. After receiving many lionfish "handouts", the fishermen observed sharks hunting and eating lionfish on their own.

This spurs hope that sharks could be "taught" to view lionfish as a viable source of food and contribute to limiting their numbers.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"In these circumstances, the commercial economy of the fur trade soon yielded to industrial economies focused on mining, forestry, and fishing. The first industrial mining (for coal) began on Vancouver Island in the early 1850s, the first sizeable industrial sawmill opened a few years later, and fish canning began on the Fraser River in 1870. From these beginnings, industrial economies reached into the interstices of British Columbia, establishing work camps close to the resource, and processing centers (canneries, sawmills, concentrating mills) at points of intersection of external and local transportation systems. As the years went by, these transportation systems expanded, bringing ever more land (resources) within reach of industrial capital. Each of these developments was a local instance of David Harvey's general point that the pace of time-space compressions after 1850 accelerated capital's "massive, long-term investment in the conquest of space" (Harvey 1989, 264) and its commodifications of nature. The very soil, Marx said in another context, was becoming "part and parcel of capital" (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

As Marx and, subsequently, others have noted, the spatial energy of capitalism works to deterritorialize people (that is, to detach them from prior bonds between people and place) and to reterritorialize them in relation to the requirements of capital (that is, to land conceived as resources and freed from the constraints of custom and to labor detached from land). For Marx the

wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil... created for the town industries the necessary supply of a 'free' and outlawed proletariat (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977) - drawing on insights from psychoanalysis - capitalism may be thought of as a desiring machine, as a sort of territorial writing machine that functions to inscribe "the flows of desire upon the surface or body of the earth" (Thomas 1994, 171-72). In Henri Lefebvre's terms, it produces space in the image of its own relations of production (1991; Smith 1990, 90). For David Harvey it entails the "restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes," and postpones the effects of its inherent contradictions by the conquest of space-capitalism's "spatial fix" (1982, ch. 13; 1985, 150, 156). In detail, positions differ; in general, it can hardly be doubted that in British Columbia industrial capitalism introduced new relationships between people and with land and that at the interface of the native and the nonnative, these relationships created total misunderstandings and powerful new axes of power that quickly detached native people from former lands. When a Tlingit chief was asked by a reserve commissioner about the work he did, he replied

I don't know how to work at anything. My father, grandfather, and uncle just taught me how to live, and I have always done what they told me-we learned this from our fathers and grandfathers and our uncles how to do the things among ourselves and we teach our children in the same way.

Two different worlds were facing each other, and one of them was fashioning very deliberate plans for the reallocation of land and the reordering of social relations. In 1875 the premier of British Columbia argued that the way to civilize native people was to bring them into the industrial workplace, there to learn the habits of thrift, time discipline, and materialism. Schools were secondary. The workplace was held to be the crucible of cultural change and, as such, the locus of what the premier depicted as a politics of altruism intended to bring native people up to the point where they could enter society as full, participating citizens. To draw them into the workplace, they had to be separated from land. Hence, in the premier's scheme of things, the small reserve, a space that could not yield a livelihood and would eject native labor toward the industrial workplace and, hence, toward civilization. Marx would have had no illusions about what was going on: native lives, he would have said, were being detached from their own means of production (from the land and the use value of their own labor on it) and were being transformed into free (unencumbered) wage laborers dependent on the social relations of capital. The social means of production and of subsistence were being converted into capital. Capital was benefiting doubly, acquiring access to land freed by small reserves and to cheap labor detached from land.

The reorientation of land and labor away from older customary uses had happened many times before, not only in earlier settler societies, but also in the British Isles and, somewhat later, in continental Europe. There, the centuries-long struggles over enclosure had been waged between many ordinary folk who sought to protect customary use rights to land and landlords who wanted to replace custom with private property rights and market economies. In the western highlands, tenants without formal contracts (the great majority) could be evicted "at will." Their former lands came to be managed by a few sheep farmers; their intricate local land uses were replaced by sheep pasture (Hunter 1976; Hornsby 1992, ch. 2). In Windsor Forest, a practical vernacular economy that had used the forest in innumerable local ways was slowly eaten away as the law increasingly favored notions of absolute property ownership, backed them up with hangings, and left less and less space for what E.P. Thompson calls "the messy complexities of coincident use-right" (1975, 241). Such developments were approximately reproduced in British Columbia, as a regime of exclusive property rights overrode a fisher-hunter-gatherer version of, in historian Jeanette Neeson's phrase, an "economy of multiple occupations" (1984, 138; Huitema, Osborne, and Ripmeester 2002). Even the rhetoric of dispossession - about lazy, filthy, improvident people who did not know how to use land properly - often sounded remarkably similar in locations thousands of miles apart (Pratt 1992, ch. 7). There was this difference: The argument against custom, multiple occupations, and the constraints of life worlds on the rights of property and the free play of the market became, in British Columbia, not an argument between different economies and classes (as it had been in Britain) but the more polarized, and characteristically racialized juxtaposition of civilization and savagery...

Moreover, in British Columbia, capital was far more attracted to the opportunities of native land than to the surplus value of native labor. In the early years, when labor was scarce, it sought native workers, but in the longer run, with its labor needs supplied otherwise (by Chinese workers contracted through labor brokers, by itinerant white loggers or miners), it was far more interested in unfettered access to resources. A bonanza of new resources awaited capital, and if native people who had always lived amid these resources could not be shipped away, they could be-indeed, had to be-detached from them. Their labor was useful for a time, but land in the form of fish, forests, and minerals was the prize, one not to be cluttered with native-use rights. From the perspective of capital, therefore, native people had to be dispossessed of their land. Otherwise, nature could hardly be developed. An industrial primary resource economy could hardly function.

In settler colonies, as Marx knew, the availability of agricultural land could turn wage laborers back into independent producers who worked for themselves instead of for capital (they vanished, Marx said, "from the labor market, but not into the workhouse") (1967, pt. 8, ch. 33). As such, they were unavailable to capital, and resisted its incursions, the source, Marx thought, of the prosperity and vitality of colonial societies. In British Columbia, where agricultural land was severely limited, many settlers were closely implicated with capital, although the objectives of the two were different and frequently antagonistic. Without the ready alternative of pioneer farming, many of them were wage laborers dependent on employment in the industrial labor market, yet often contending with capital in bitter strikes. Some of them sought to become capitalists. In M. A. Grainger's Woodsmen of the West, a short, vivid novel set in early modern British Columbia, the central character, Carter, wrestles with this opportunity. Carter had grown up on a rock farm in Nova Scotia, worked at various jobs across the continent, and fetched up in British Columbia at a time when, for a nominal fee, the government leased standing timber to small operators. He acquired a lease in a remote fjord and there, with a few men under towering glaciers at the edge of the world economy, attacked the forest. His chances were slight, but the land was his opportunity, his labor his means, and he threw himself at the forest with the intensity of Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale. There were many Carters.

But other immigrants did become something like Marx's independent producers. They had found a little land on the basis of which they hoped to get by, avoid the work relations of industrial capitalism, and leave their progeny more than they had known themselves. Their stories are poignant. A Czech peasant family, forced from home for want of land, finding its way to one of the coaltowns of southeastern British Columbia, and then, having accumulated a little cash from mining, homesteading in the province's arid interior. The homestead would consume a family's work while yielding a living of sorts from intermittent sales from a dry wheat farm and a large measure of domestic self-sufficiency-a farm just sustaining a family, providing a toe-hold in a new society, and a site of adaptation to it. Or, a young woman from a brick, working-class street in Derby, England, coming to British Columbia during the depression years before World War I, finding work up the coast in a railway hotel in Prince Rupert, quitting with five dollars to her name after a manager's amorous advances, traveling east as far as five dollars would take her on the second train out of Prince Rupert, working in a small frontier hotel, and eventually marrying a French Canadian farmer. There, in a northern British Columbian valley, in a context unlike any she could have imagined as a girl, she would raise a family and become a stalwart of a diverse local society in which no one was particularly well off. Such stories are at the heart of settler colonialism (Harris 1997, ch. 8).

The lives reflected in these stories, like the productions of capital, were sustained by land. Older regimes of custom had been broken, in most cases by enclosures or other displacements in the homeland several generations before emigration. Many settlers became property owners, holders of land in fee simple, beneficiaries of a landed opportunity that, previously, had been unobtainable. But use values had not given way entirely to exchange values, nor was labor entirely detached from land. Indeed, for all the work associated with it, the pioneer farm offered a temporary haven from capital. The family would be relatively autonomous (it would exploit itself). There would be no outside boss. Cultural assumptions about land as a source of security and family-centered independence; assumptions rooted in centuries of lives lived elsewhere seemed to have found a place of fulfillment. Often this was an illusion - the valleys of British Columbia are strewn with failed pioneer farms - but even illusions drew immigrants and occupied them with the land.

In short, and in a great variety of ways, British Columbia offered modest opportunities to ordinary people of limited means, opportunities that depended, directly or indirectly, on access to land. The wage laborer in the resource camp, as much as the pioneer farmer, depended on such access, as, indirectly, did the shopkeeper who relied on their custom.

In this respect, the interests of capital and settlers converged. For both, land was the opportunity at hand, an opportunity that gave settler colonialism its energy. Measured in relation to this opportunity, native people were superfluous. Worse, they were in the way, and, by one means or another, had to be removed. Patrick Wolfe is entirely correct in saying that "settler societies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies," which, by occupying land of their ancestors, had got in the way (1999, 2). If, here and there, their labor was useful for a time, capital and settlers usually acquired labor by other means, and in so doing, facilitated the uninhibited construction of native people as redundant and expendable. In 1840 in Oxford, Herman Merivale, then a professor of political economy and later a permanent undersecretary at the Colonial Office, had concluded as much. He thought that the interests of settlers and native people were fundamentally opposed, and that if left to their own devices, settlers would launch wars of extermination. He knew what had been going on in some colonies - "wretched details of ferocity and treachery" - and considered that what he called the amalgamation (essentially, assimilation through acculturation and miscegenation) of native people into settler society to be the only possible solution (1928, lecture xviii). Merivale's motives were partly altruistic, yet assimilation as colonial practice was another means of eliminating "native" as a social category, as well as any land rights attached to it as, everywhere, settler colonialism would tend to do.

These different elements of what might be termed the foundational complex of settler colonial power were mutually reinforcing. When, in 1859, a first large sawmill was contemplated on the west coast of Vancouver Island, its manager purchased the land from the Crown and then, arriving at the intended mill site, dispersed its native inhabitants at the point of a cannon (Sproat 1868). He then worried somewhat about the proprieties of his actions, and talked with the chief, trying to convince him that, through contact with whites, his people would be civilized and improved. The chief would have none of it, but could stop neither the loggers nor the mill. The manager and his men had debated the issue of rights, concluding (in an approximation of Locke) that the chief and his people did not occupy the land in any civilized sense, that it lay in waste for want of labor, and that if labor were not brought to such land, then the worldwide progress of colonialism, which was "changing the whole surface of the earth," would come to a halt. Moreover, and whatever the rights or wrongs, they assumed, with unabashed self-interest, that colonists would keep what they had got: "this, without discussion, we on the west coast of Vancouver Island were all prepared to do." Capital was establishing itself at the edge of a forest within reach of the world economy, and, in so doing, was employing state sanctioned property rights, physical power, and cultural discourse in the service of interest."

- Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), p. 172-174.

[fatehbaz]

The Clear Lake hitch (Lavinia exilicauda chi) is a rare endemic species of minnow living only in the Clear Lake watershed of northern California, a fish that was once a “symbol of abundance” for Indigenous people. In December 2022, the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, Robinson Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians, Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians and the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake ask for immediate emergency protection of the hitch. The fish is in danger of extinction as the last observed successful breeding for the species was in 2017, and the creatures only have a six-year-long lifespan. US land management agencies say hitch numbers have “fallen to near zero.” However, in the past, there were millions of hitch in the watershed each year, and the fish was important to Indigenous food systems. Local “entrepreneurs” prefer to protect the introduced non-native bass, which voraciously preys on the endangered hitch. Clear Lake hosts dozens of bass tournaments each year, events large enough to attract international visitors. There is a past-time tradition (”hitching”) of children beating the hitch to death with baseball bats in the springtime as the hitch gather in streams to try to spawn. The hitch is also threatened by pesticides, runoff, and overuse of water for the region’s prominent local vineyards. The hitch is referred to as a “trash fish,” and some feel that this insults the importance of the fish to Pomo people.

Excerpts below from: Louis Sahagun of Los Angeles Times. “As a sacred minnow nears extinction, Native Americans of Clear Lake call for bold plan.” As published at Phys.org. 6 December 2022.

---

Spring runs of a large minnow numbering in the millions have nourished Pomo Indians since they first made their home alongside Northern California’s Clear Lake more than 400 generations ago. The Clear Lake hitch glinted like silver dollars as they headed up the lake’s tributaries to spawn, a reliable squirming crop of plenty, steeped in history [...].

In all that time, the hitch’s domain, about 110 miles northwest of Sacramento, had never suffered the degradation of recent years.

Now, with a growing sense of sorrow, if not anger, the Pomo Indian tribes of Clear Lake are watching the symbol of abundance and security they call chi dwindle into extinction.

---

On Monday [December 2022], they took the rare and drastic step of urging Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to use her emergency powers and invoke the federal Endangered Species Act on behalf of the Clear Lake hitch. “Bringing the chi back will require a bold plan of action devised by people with the power to move mountains,” said Ron Montez, tribal historic preservation officer for the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians. 

“I have almost zero confidence in state or federal officials to save the chi and our way of life,” Montez, 72, said. [...]

The Clear Lake hitch was designated as a threatened species under California’s Endangered Species Act in 2014. Since then, however, its numbers have fallen to near zero, according to recent surveys. 

Some causes of the hitch’s decline, however, seem extraordinarily difficult to fix: prolonged drought, mercury contamination, gravel mining, an overtaxed water distribution system, pesticides and runoff from vineyards [...], and predatory nonnative game fish. [...]

---

The 2023 spring spawning season is crucial for the continued survival of the Clear Lake hitch, scientists say. That’s because the last observed successful spawning was in 2017. “Hitch have a six-year life span,” said Meg Townsend, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. [...]

---

But until its fate is known for certain, Michael Fris, a field supervisor at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said his agency is unlikely to list the hitch on an emergency basis. [...] That kind of talk prompted the Center for Biological Diversity, together with the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, Robinson Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians, Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians and the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake to take their request for emergency listing to Haaland.

All involved agree that seeking intervention under the federal Endangered Species Act is an act of desperation. Only two species have been emergency-listed as federally endangered over the last 20 years: the Miami blue butterfly in 2011 and Nevada’s Dixie Valley toad earlier this year. [...]

---

The hitch is a 12-inch-long minnow found only in and around the oldest, largest and perhaps most polluted and wildfire-prone watershed in California. In 2020, the Lake County region was charred by six of the 20 largest wildfires in state history. [...]

It’s been the poor luck of the hitch to require adequate stream flows in February, March and April to trek from the lake to spawning beds at the same time agricultural interests need water to defrost their vineyards.

---

“An emergency listing would force people to consider alternatives to the way water is used in this region,” said Sarah Ryan, environmental director for the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians.

Beyond water flows, the prospect of emergency-listing the hitch raises other economically significant issues connected to the lake’s food chain: Zooplankton are eaten by shad, crayfish and hitch, which are favored by monster catfish and largemouth bass.

Clear Lake entrepreneurs host dozens of professional bass tournaments each year that are supported by contestants from around the world.

The most popular lures in local tackle shops are hitch replicas that cost up to $180 each. Other lures are made to resemble juvenile hitch and sold under a slogan that some people feel mocks the creature’s cultural importance to Pomo people: “The All-American Trash Fish.”

Over at [C.O.], a sporting goods store on the southern end of the lake, old-timers still talk about how local kids had a tradition of “hitching,” beating hitch to death with baseball bats for fun as they ascended streams to spawn in spring. 

They also grumble over the thought of new special protections for a nongame fish disrupting human pastimes for any reason [...].

"The reason our bass grow so big is that they love to eat hitch," mused [D.B.], owner of [C.O.]. "So, when customers ask me, 'Where can I catch the biggest bass of my life?' " he added, "I send them to places hitch hang out in."

---

That kind of banter and lore suggests that unless government agencies yield to Native American concerns, they are headed for a showdown of complicated and competing values.

“The way some people ridicule hitch makes me wonder what they think about the folks who eat them,” lamented Robert Geary, cultural resources director for the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake. [...]

---

At the heart of the matter is that Pomo people [...] did not consider their native attitudes and lifestyles to be an expendable price of living in America.

Yet, their modern history is told mostly through economic hardship, rip-offs, massacres and environmental destruction.

---

Headline, image, caption, and text by: Louis Sahagun of Los Angeles Times. “As a sacred minnow nears extinction, Native Americans of Clear Lake call for bold plan.” As published at Phys.org. 6 December 2022. [First paragraph in this post added by me.]

[crevicedwelling]

What foods should I give my dear palmetto bug?

I assume that’s referring to an American cockroach (Periplaneta americana) but there might be a few other nonnative and one native species that that name could refer to. regardless, roaches generally like the same foods; offer some dead leaf litter as decor and occasional snacks (all roaches eat some detritus, termites are roaches that took that to the extreme!). squashes of all types, oranges, carrots, and apples are good vegetable staples, while fish flakes and dog food in very small amounts help supplement them with protein. never give too much protein, this gives roaches gout! I find that Periplaneta enjoy starchy food too, so crumbs of bread and a rolled oat or two would be a nice treat for it

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

At first glance the hills and valleys covered in coastal sage scrub oak are little more than a featureless green swath. On closer inspection, however, you can recognize it for what it truly is: the beating heart of one of the most genetically rich ecosystems on the planet. Birds, insects, mammals, fungi, and even some other plants find refuge under the boughs of coastal sage scrub oak, while water drawn up from its deep roots spreads out to sustain ground-dwelling organisms.

Species name:

Coastal sage scrub oak or Nuttall’s scrub oak (Quercus dumosa)

Description:

The coastal sage scrub oak rarely grows more than about 7 feet tall, but it can spread outward a great distance thanks to its lateral branches and multiple trunks. The trees’ small, spiny leaves emerge in the spring soft and bright green, but gradually toughen and darken to a dusty dark green by summer. Their acorns tend to be thin and elongated, almost conical.

Where it’s found:

The coastal sage scrub oak, as its name implies, is found along coastal areas in Southern and Baja California. The full extent of its range is the subject of spirited debate, as it shares many similar physical characteristics with other scrub oaks found more inland. In San Diego County, the remaining populations of coastal sage scrub oak exist in fragmented populations, usually in wildlife reserves, like islands in a sea of urban development.

IUCN Red List status:

Endangered

Major threats:

Urban development destroyed much of this tree’s habitat, and its remnant population still faces this threat, along with several others. The introduction of grasses and other highly flammable nonnative species, like eucalyptus, have increased fire frequency and intensity. Escaped ornamental plants and grasses can outcompete oak saplings for light, space, and water. And climate change is resulting in disruptions to precipitation, which stresses all populations.

My favorite experience:

While collecting tissue samples after a spring rain, I took a moment to look at the tracks imprinted into the soft ground. Animal prints were everywhere — mule deer, raccoon, fox, opossum, roadrunner, and what I hoped were those of an exceedingly large bobcat and not a mountain lion. I rarely saw any of these animals during the day but, thanks to the rain, it was clear that they were all around me — present but hidden within the oaks.

My favorite experience:

What I could see, however, were the many birds flying from tree to tree, reminding me of fish swimming among outcrops of coral. Insects buzzed all around. Galls created by tiny wasps were starting to grow from some of the oaks. By summer, some of these galls would grow to the size and color of a peach, bobbing slowly in wind scented with wildflowers, sunbaked dust, and sagebrush. I knew that under my feet deep roots reached toward the precious groundwater that would sustain the forest during the dry season, and spreading from those roots were mycorrhizal fungi that would work with the oaks to support each other.

I grew up among the firs, cedars, hemlocks, and maples of the Pacific Northwest. I always thought forests needed to be composed of tall, majestic trees christened with carpets of rolling moss. Yet this sea of small, scraggly oaks held so much life. My perspective grew. It’s one thing to read about this ecosystem and another matter entirely to truly see it and understand how precious it is.

[nohiketoosmall]

today one of our fellow restoration volunteers found a praying mantis and brought it back to the group to identify it as a nonnative one and I ID'd it as a European praying mantis but after we were playing with it for a bit me and my partner felt bad for her.

she's non-native/invasive so the others wanted to squish her, which im not really against persay, at least in a general sense. I mean, there isn't any evidence that european mantids pose a significant harm on the environment and it feels needlessly mean to kill them when you aren't going to make any significant dent in their population. i mean, its not like terribly bad or anything i just wouldn't want to do it.

anyways, we uh. brought her home. we actually stopped at the reptile shop (which also sells inverts) and chatted with them a bit, the invert guy was in and confirmed she's an adult female and probably already laid eggs based on her abdomen and the time of year. If she does lay eggs, I'll just put them in the freezer and I guess feed them to the pillbugs or something

ill have to do some proper research on praying mantis care. She'll probably only live a short time- a couple weeks or months- but she's fun to observe and I had an old fish tank I could easily repurpose into a simple container for now.

[bunniesloveanimals]

Sulawesi snails or rabbit snails, named after their long antennae, are endangered freshwater snails that make up the genus Tylomelania. They're from, who coulda guessed, Sulawesi, a small island that's a part of Indonesia. They come in many different colors, patterns and shells that make them incredibly unique little guys.

Chocolate Rabbit Snail, Tylomelania zemis. These snails are found in the Malili lake system which consists of lake Matano, lake Mahalona, lake Towuti, lake Lontoa, and lake Masapi. They're also found in lake Poso. These lakes have soft water and basic pHs, which these snails prefer. They don't go very keep, only in the first meter or two of water, found on multiple types of substrate.

Yellow Antenna Rabbit Snail, Tylomelania gemmifera. In the wild, these snails will eat things like detritus and decaying plant matter. To get to these things, they'll burrow into the substrate in search of food. They do this in aquariums too, so don't be alarmed if your little guy goes under for a few hours.

Flowerhorn Cichlid, Amphilophus hybrid. Some species of these guys are endangered due to changes in the lakes they live in. An invasive fish, the flowerhorn cichlid, eat these snails and other creatures in their habitat, spreading across the lakes of Sulawesi. Dams have blocked water flow and kept snails from reaching eachother and development and deforestation have increased sedimentation in the lakes.

Yellow Spotted Rabbit Snail, Tylomelania towutica. Along with being aware of the impact that things like releasing nonnative animals like the flowerhorn and building dams have on important habitats for different creatures, Tylomelania can continue to survive with the help of those who keep them in aquariums. Now we're handing it over to @endangered-aquarium-fish for the tips you need to take care of your water bunnies.

[tarantula-hawk-wasp]

To make up for getting 2.5 hrs of sleep the night before my brain really went into overdrive on the dreams today

Under the read more if you want to read my dream diary

One dream was where I was reading a book and then the dream became the book which was a story about a very unethical aquarium trying to bring back the long extinct pliosaur and worship it as a cult.

The protagonist was a late teenage who worked there and then “accidentally fell” (pushed) in to the unlit nighttime tank with their larger aquatic life, and she can sense something communicating with her, a confusing mix of neutral and hostile, and then frantically manages to escape the tank but breaks her leg in the process. Then after leaving that job and having her leg heal, she’s leery of water despite being in a beach town, and leery of the aquarium.

But then she meets a different young woman who is by the public beach entrance protesting the aquarium for unethical behavior including dumping animals into the sea illegally because nonnative species that were found in the aquarium have been found in the nearby water.

The two girls hit off because the first one still had confusing suspicions about her accident and the other was very gung-ho about investigating. And together they found the like secret lab of the aquarium and in a cold room they found a freezer full of cetacean brains - some whole some dissected. And they found files revealing that the first girl had been identified as someone who had a brain compatible with cetacean communication (this is the second time this year I’ve had a dream about a girl who can talk to whales).

After they found the lab the next step was to test if she could talk to whales, but obviously due to trauma she’s scared of getting back in the water (I have a severe phobia of fish. Scary water dreams are weekly) but the other girl holds her hand and promises to be there the whole time etc.

And like overall their relationship was very sweet in a “shared cause and investigation and now that we know why you’re special I’ll fight to protect you” way.

So they go in the sea and the whale girl can sense things and realizes that the whales are very afraid of something, but there are other slightly different voices communicating too, she can also understand large fish, not just whales, and they’re concerned too. (Almost like experimental attempts at bringing back an aquatic apex predator are happening)

Unhelpfully the dream ended there

The second dream I had was about a town being terrorized by a bear. Now I don’t know why this bear was so special and so bad but it was. There was a level of absurdity to the actual size of the threat versus the madmaxian lifestyle shift. It was a small town like the one I grew up on tbh.

I was myself in this and I was in a found family situation with a middle aged actor (not anyone real), myself, a 12 yo girl, and a 7 yo boy. Now were they orphaned by the bear? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ unclear. But we all pretty much lived out of a big SUV and a big part of the dream was doing a grocery run but the bear was inside the grocery store.

So it was me trying to balance who finds what on the grocery list with the Man, and trying to keep track of where the kids were, and where the bear was. Which included moments like trying to figure out what aisle the peanut butter (because my sleeping brain did think of a pretty solid grocery list of minimally perishable food kids would eat like pbj and cereal bars and dry cereal (the man was in charge of getting canned food)) was in but having to creep by the aisle where the bear was eating an unfortunate fellow shopper.

Out of the grocery store there was a mix of domestic experiences like feeding the kids or getting them to sleep and like trying to help hunt the bear. The town had a tall radio tower they used as a watch tower with movable mirrors to signal where the bear was sighted.

We joined a woman in fun leather armor in a spear hunt, like I was riding sitting on the open car window with a spear to do some drive by lancing.

It was at this point I was getting suspicious that the bear might be enhanced or mutated or special in some way. Only at that point.

The dream also ended without resolution about what happened with the bear

[floridafishkeeper]

The hoplosternum litorale I brought back and added to the invasive tank. I have a few larger tanks for various cichlids and medium sized catfish. I put these guys at 8-9" each. Absolute units. Blessedly these guys adapt to captivity readily and there's always people looking to home them.

[plethoraworldatlas]

Decades of conservation work led by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and supported by American Bird Conservancy (ABC) and partners are paying off for Hawai‘i's Millerbird (Ulūlu). Today, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species announced that the species is being downlisted to Endangered status after being listed as Critically Endangered since 2000. Once found only on the island of Nihoa, a team of scientists and conservationists translocated 50 individuals to Laysan, creating a second, self-sustaining population that significantly decreased this species' risk of extinction.

“The Millerbird translocations were an exciting, collaborative victory for Hawaiian conservation and it is immensely rewarding seeing this recognized by IUCN,” said Chris Farmer, ABC's Hawai‘i Program Director, who participated in the translocations. “The population increase on Laysan will help protect this species' future, and shows that long-term support and commitment can prevent extinctions of any other Hawaiian birds.”

The Millerbird, a small insect-eating warbler, was once found on both Nihoa and Laysan (Kauō) Islands in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Tragically the population on Laysan went extinct by the early 20th century, along with two other endemic bird species, the Laysan Rail and Laysan Honeycreeper, due to loss of vegetation from nonnative rabbits and other introduced mammals. After that, the species was limited to a few hundred individuals on the rocky, 178-acre Nihoa, 650 miles away from Laysan.

To prevent another extinction from happening, a goal was set to establish a second “insurance” population of Millerbirds on Laysan. Rabbits and other invasive mammals were removed from Laysan by 1923. After years of natural regeneration and intensive habitat restoration by USFWS, the island had recovered sufficiently to make it suitable for the Millerbird reintroduction effort

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

sorry to keep bugging you lol but if you don't mind, where did you see the tenches?? i've never seen one in an aquarium and sadly they are an invasive species in my area, but their numbers are low anyways. i'd absolutely love to see one in real life. thanks!!

-- tench loving anon

I saw them at Maretarium! I’ve talked about it a bunch in the past, it’s a public aquarium that displays native and nonnative Finnish fish, and it is indeed located in Finland. Statistically speaking there’s a good chance you’re not from Finland which unfortunately means it’s quite a trip ^^’ How unfortunate that they’re an invasive species, but perhaps one day there will be an aquarium housing tenches near you and you will get to see them in real life!

[outpost51]

🍸🎳🤦‍♀️ foooooor Kadmos, Atria and Dillon pls?

OC Emoji Asks

🍸- Favourite drink?

Kadmos: brandy in a warmed glass, or whisky on the rocks — if cocktails are being served, he likes an Old Fashioned.

Atria: she doesn’t drink because she watched what it did to her dad :’) but! She and her Squad™️ have a mixed drink they’ve affectionately dubbed an “engine sludge” — half a can of any energy drink, half a bottle of Tupari, a few spoonfuls of frozen juice concentrate, one (1) energy shot, and a handful of off-brand Skittles. Idk how they’re not all dead, honestly.

Dillon: Anything that “comes with a snack” (edible garnish)!

🎳 - Do they have hobbies? If yes, what are they?

Kadmos: he’s got a few, actually! He loves being out on the water, whether it’s on a yacht or a kayak or a little fishing boat — he’ll fish off a dock, even, and keeps a portable grill with his tackle box. Loves camping (in cabins) and hunting with his uncle. He’s picked up a few active hobbies while researching roles, too!

Atria: tinkering! She loves scrapping together random shit in the garage to make functional gadgets, sometimes to the detriment of her own health (broken bones from the hoverboard, electrical burns on her hands, Torch’s gun arm wound up and pinched her finger real good, etc)

Dillon: answered here!

🤦‍♀️ - Something that continues to embarrass them to this day

Kadmos: he’ll claim he’s never done anything embarrassing ever, then change the subject. His family, on the other hand, has plenty of stories that prove quite the opposite. When he was still just a twiggy little drake (i know, kadmos? little?), he was uhhhhh feeding a snitch to the snapjaw in the lake behind his grandfather's house and wasn't paying attention to the stake he was tying the bait rope to. The snapjaw grabbed its meal, the rope pulled taught over the branch, and that stake he tied the rope to? His spur. Not the stake. He got yanked all the way up into the tree feet first, broke his spur, and lost his pants along the way. Poor Kaddy was only stuck up there for about ten minutes before someone came to check on him, but he'll hide in his cowl if any of his aunts bring it up.

Atria: so while she’s recovering after the events of BRHP, she and Torch both get to hang with uncle Hericus all day — partially for physical therapy, partially just to get them out of the house. Hericus, being the weird hippie brother that lives in the woods behind his dad’s house, has always been pretty big on conservation and ensuring the food chain stays balanced; as such, this means he keeps track of the local shatha population since they’re nonnative to Taetrus — I’ll probably go into that worldbuilding some day. ANYWAY. He has a database and tags the ones he comes across in the Wildlands, so he took the girls out with him! Atria doesn’t like guns, so she was on tagging duty while Torch and Hericus handled the tranq darts. Periodically, the tags need to get scanned to ensure they’re still tracking properly and to snag some extra data off them, and that’s precisely what Atria was doing with M-41 (who they think might be Pudge’s dad, or an uncle) when the big bastard took a deep breath and she went ass-over-tea-kettle off his flank, right into the swamp water. Yeah, not her proudest moment.

Dillon: You'd think it would be The Incident that mortified her out of wearing skirts, but no, it was the time when her parents had taken her and Daisy out to a decent restaurant to celebrate Daisy getting a solo at the dance studio -- mind you, Dillon was only five and Daisy was eight. Cheryl took baby pickle to the bathroom, and when they re-emerged, Dillon announced to the entire restaurant (at the tippy-top of her little lungs) what she'd accomplished upon the porcelain throne. Cheryl still tells the story any time Dillon gets a little too cocky.

[ladyfuxuan]

ABOUT ROZALINA; wip

×—ʙᴀꜱɪᴄꜱ—×

ɴᴀᴍᴇ: Rozalina Orion,

ɴɪᴄᴋɴᴀᴍᴇ(ꜱ): Roza, Roz, Ro, Little Hero, Rozamog

ᴛɪᴛʟᴇ(ꜱ): Warrior of Light, Dragoon of the skies, Child of the mist

ɢᴇɴᴅᴇʀ / ʜ��ᴡ ᴛʜᴇʏ ɪᴅᴇɴᴛɪꜰʏ: What's a gender? Doesn't care they are Rozalina (they/she)

ʀᴀᴄᴇ: Miqo'te

ᴀɢᴇ: 30

ʙɪʀᴛʜᴅᴀʏ: 16/10

ʙɪʀᴛʜᴘʟᴀᴄᴇ: Coerthas, Ferndale (Doman parents)

ɢᴜᴀʀᴅɪᴀɴ ꜱɪɢɴ: Menphina

ɴᴀᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟɪᴛʏ: Ishgardian, Doman

×—ᴀᴘᴘᴇᴀʀᴀɴᴄᴇ—×

ʜᴇɪɢʜᴛ: 4'11

ᴡᴇɪɢʜᴛ: idk

ʙᴏᴅʏ ᴛʏᴘᴇ: Short and stocky

ʜᴀɪʀ ᴄᴏʟᴏʀ: Light pink

ᴇʏᴇ ᴄᴏʟᴏʀ: Brown, glowing orange shapes

ᴄᴏᴍᴘʟᴇxɪᴏɴ: pale, freckled

ʙɪʀᴛʜᴍᴀʀᴋꜱ: None

ꜱᴄᴀʀꜱ: Various, most across chest and one across their ribs

ᴛᴀᴛᴛᴏᴏꜱ: large rose on left thigh

ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ 🇺​​🇳​​🇮​​🇶​​🇺​​🇪 ꜰᴇᴀᴛᴜʀᴇꜱ: Lots of moles, two under right eye, one above right eyebrow and one on chin

ᴄʟᴇᴀɴʟɪɴᴇꜱꜱ / ɢʀᴏᴏᴍɪɴɢ: very clean, smells like lilacs and tanned leather

ᴇᴠᴇʀʏᴅᴀʏ ᴄʟᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ ꜱᴛʏʟᴇ: shorts, boots and jackets, not overly femme

ᴀᴄᴄᴇꜱꜱᴏʀɪᴇꜱ: ribbon in hair that was a gift from estinien, engagement ring on necklace

×—ʜᴇᴀʟᴛʜ—×

ᴀʟʟᴇʀɢɪᴇꜱ: bananas

ɪʟʟɴᴇꜱꜱᴇꜱ: nonne

ᴅɪꜱᴀʙɪʟɪᴛɪᴇꜱ: autism, dyslexia

ᴇɴᴇʀɢʏ ʟᴇᴠᴇʟꜱ: high, very excitable

ᴇᴀᴛɪɴɢ ʜᴀʙɪᴛꜱ: lots of fish and fresh fruit

ꜱʟᴇᴇᴘɪɴɢ ʜᴀʙɪᴛꜱ: sleeps a lot, naps everyday

ꜰɪᴛɴᴇꜱꜱ: works out a lot, loves to train!

×—ᴘᴇʀꜱᴏɴᴀʟɪᴛʏ—×

ɪɴᴛʀᴏᴠᴇʀᴛ / ᴇxᴛʀᴏᴠᴇʀᴛ: Ambivert!

ᴛᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴀᴍᴇɴᴛ: quick to anger but calms down easily

ᴄᴏᴍᴍᴜɴɪᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ꜱᴛʏʟᴇ: talkative, likes to speak her mind

ɢᴏᴀʟꜱ / ᴅᴇꜱɪʀᴇꜱ: to make a safe future where her and estinien, along with the scions don't need to save the world all the time

ᴠɪʀᴛᴜᴇꜱ: kind, helpful, heroic

ꜰʟᴀᴡꜱ: temperamental, stubborn, reckless

ꜱᴛʀᴇɴɢᴛʜꜱ: raw strength, battle intellect, self healing, aetherical tracking

ᴡᴇᴀᴋɴᴇꜱꜱᴇꜱ: magic, recklessness

ꜰᴇᴀʀꜱ: heights, spiders, bugs

ᴏʙꜱᴇꜱꜱɪᴏɴꜱ: fishing

Qᴜɪʀᴋꜱ / ᴛɪᴄꜱ: talkative, very swishy tail

ꜱᴇᴄʀᴇᴛꜱ: They thought Zenos was hot

ʀᴇɢʀᴇᴛꜱ: none

×—ʀᴇʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴꜱʜɪᴘꜱ ɪ—×

ᴍᴏᴛʜᴇʀ: Haruko Liu

ꜰᴀᴛʜᴇʀ: Jiehong Liu

ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ᴘᴀʀᴇɴᴛᴀʟ ꜰɪɢᴜʀᴇ(ꜱ): Mogzin, Hraevelgver

ꜱɪʙʟɪɴɢ(ꜱ): none

ɢʀᴀɴᴅᴘᴀʀᴇɴᴛꜱ: ᴄʜɪʟᴅʀᴇɴ: Midgardsommer

ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ ꜰᴀᴍɪʟʏ: the scions

×—ʀᴇʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴꜱʜɪᴘꜱ ɪɪ—×

ʀᴏᴍᴀɴᴛɪᴄ / ꜱᴇxᴜᴀʟ ᴏʀɪᴇɴᴛᴀᴛɪᴏɴ: Bisexual

ʀᴇʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴꜱʜɪᴘ ꜱᴛᴀᴛᴜꜱ: engaged

ꜱᴘᴏᴜꜱᴇ:

ᴘᴀʀᴛɴᴇʀ/ ꜱɪɢɴɪꜰɪᴄᴀɴᴛ ᴏᴛʜᴇʀ(ꜱ): Estinien Varlinau

ʟᴏᴠᴇʀ(ꜱ): ᴄʟᴏꜱᴇꜱᴛ ꜰʀɪᴇɴᴅꜱ: Y'shtola, The cions

ᴀᴄQᴜᴀɪɴᴛᴀɴᴄᴇꜱ: n/a

ᴄᴏᴡᴏʀᴋᴇʀꜱ/ᴄᴏᴍʀᴀᴅᴇꜱ: The Scions

ʀɪᴠᴀʟꜱ: Estinien (formerly)

ᴇɴᴇᴍɪᴇꜱ: lots....

×—ʟɪꜰᴇꜱᴛʏʟᴇ—×

ᴏᴄᴄᴜᴘᴀᴛɪᴏɴ: Warrior of Light, fisher, mercenary

ꜱᴏᴄɪᴀʟ ᴄʟᴀꜱꜱ: n/a

ᴇᴅᴜᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴ: n/a

ᴄᴜʀʀᴇɴᴛ ʀᴇꜱɪᴅᴇɴᴄᴇ: Radz-at-han. Ishgard

ʜᴏʙʙɪᴇꜱ: Fishing, painting, dancing

ᴠɪᴄᴇꜱ: Red Wine

ᴄʀɪᴍɪɴᴀʟ ʀᴇᴄᴏʀᴅ: n/a

ꜱᴘᴇɴᴅɪɴɢ ʜᴀʙɪᴛꜱ: n/a

ꜱᴏᴄɪᴀʟ ᴏʀ ʟᴏɴᴇʀ: A mix

ꜰᴀɪᴛʜ / ʀᴇʟɪɢɪᴏɴ: none