#or biomed engineer 👀👀👀

[breadandblankets]

steph and duke hang out a lot while steph is in college, between classes and her apprenticeship with leslie, through that duke gets roped into helping out enough that his first aid skills get a workout

turns out in a medical setting having a guy who can tell u what's wrong on the inside without having to order imaging is really helpful!

having the signal as your radiologist would also kick ass tbh

[bonefall]

Sorry to bother with my maple tree questions (again), but I was just wondering what books you’d recommend for me to become more familiar with England’s tree ecology? 👀 i… I feel rather silly having to look up “do maple trees / apple trees / insert plant life here exist in northern England” every time I want to talk about the spring flowers :;

But also if I don’t describe the native plant life changing then what am I to write about in the heavy silence that follows awkward questions I just gotta talk about the whirlybird seeds falling a hair too early for the season or I’ll turn into a puddle

A really good intro to the types of flora you'll see in England can be found by visiting Woodlandtrust.org.uk! They do education on woodlands specifically, so I use them a lot when I'm writing about ThunderClan territory.

From there, I take a tree they're talking about and try to read more about it, then use iNaturalist to confirm if it's in my modeled region. There are also times I work backwards, using iNaturalist to browse the sorts of trees and flowers that exist here and learning more about how they got there, and if the cats would have it in their territory.

For the non-woodland biomes, I find Wildlifetrusts.org helpful sometimes. Sadly though, this site is not nearly as well managed as Woodland Trust and there's some dead links, so I find that researching rivers, moorland, and bogs is harder.

I think I've got forest ecology research down to a good science, but the other biomes, I have to tap into my search engine skills. It's probably a symptom of how non-forest biomes kinda tend to get neglected by casual conservationists. LOVE YOUR LOCAL WETLAND, GOD DAMN IT

[hvndredzones]

are the girls growing anything Weird in the vivarium 👀

oh most definitely. Fawn grows Weird Shit for study, Dahlia grows Weird Shit because she thinks its neat. I'm turning this into the Vivarium semi-meta post with screenshots of the build.

The Vivarium is an abnormality of desert greenhouses, in that it was there before the rest, built in one of the City's very first pushes out into the desert. It flew largely under the radar by the standards of the desert, and served as a research outpost into sustainability in desert living for the City. To that end, there are some attempts at reverse-engineering like, crops and Old World plants that our apocalyptic desert biome mutated. (Fawn and Dahlia were actually born and raised out there, and reared by their parents - scientists based out of the greenhouse.)

There are also some plants that were rescued from the ruins of Old World stuff. For instance, they definitely have at least one corpse flower. It blooms annually, given the conditions its kept in, which is both very fascinating for them and an awful experience because it'll be hot and humid and also smells like a dead body.

And then there are Desert Plants. Some were cultivated from cuttings or seeds, while others were straight up yoinked from the desert and brought to the Vivarium. The desert plants have some weird crossbreeding that Fawn is both interested in and plagued by, as it makes her research difficult (samples contaminating samples and all). The cross-breeding and mutation variants of desert plants are inside, while odds and ends of the standard desert plants are outside under the pointed trellis/pergola.

Dahlia likes trying to cultivate different flowers, and also does a tiny bit of splicing, though a lot of the time it's accidental. She's got some weird poppies, and a cactus that flowers but definitely wasn't a flowering species of cactus before the apocalypse.

Two rows of their greenhouse are dedicated to the cultivation of weed, which has become their trading currency and income source of choice. Part of the decision to take Zilch (@havenofseven) in was fueled by the knowledge that they could really do with the extra assistance in protecting their home and their product.

It's also got a "secret" cellar with pumps and water filtration, which is what irrigates the greenhouse. The reservoir is also what they pull from for the functional(!) running water of the small house. Fawn has a small workspace down there, where she has some of her more photosensitive experiments, and also an assortment of fungi.