#plant fire

[reasonsforhope]

In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, the long study of a butterfly once thought extinct has led to a chain reaction of conservation in a long-cultivated region.

The conservation work, along with helping other species, has been so successful that the Fender’s blue butterfly is slated to be downlisted from Endangered to Threatened on the Endangered Species List—only the second time an insect has made such a recovery.

[Note: "the second time" is as of the article publication in November 2022.]

To live out its nectar-drinking existence in the upland prairie ecosystem in northwest Oregon, Fender’s blue relies on the help of other species, including humans, but also ants, and a particular species of lupine.

After Fender’s blue was rediscovered in the 1980s, 50 years after being declared extinct, scientists realized that the net had to be cast wide to ensure its continued survival; work which is now restoring these upland ecosystems to their pre-colonial state, welcoming indigenous knowledge back onto the land, and spreading the Kincaid lupine around the Willamette Valley.

First collected in 1929 [more like "first formally documented by Western scientists"], Fender’s blue disappeared for decades. By the time it was rediscovered only 3,400 or so were estimated to exist, while much of the Willamette Valley that was its home had been turned over to farming on the lowland prairie, and grazing on the slopes and buttes.

Pictured: Female and male Fender’s blue butterflies.

Now its numbers have quadrupled, largely due to a recovery plan enacted by the Fish and Wildlife Service that targeted the revival at scale of Kincaid’s lupine, a perennial flower of equal rarity. Grown en-masse by inmates of correctional facility programs that teach green-thumb skills for when they rejoin society, these finicky flowers have also exploded in numbers.

[Note: Okay, I looked it up, and this is NOT a new kind of shitty greenwashing prison labor. This is in partnership with the Sustainability in Prisons Project, which honestly sounds like pretty good/genuine organization/program to me. These programs specifically offer incarcerated people college credits and professional training/certifications, and many of the courses are written and/or taught by incarcerated individuals, in addition to the substantial mental health benefits (see x, x, x) associated with contact with nature.]

The lupines needed the kind of upland prairie that’s now hard to find in the valley where they once flourished because of the native Kalapuya people’s regular cultural burning of the meadows.

While it sounds counterintuitive to burn a meadow to increase numbers of flowers and butterflies, grasses and forbs [a.k.a. herbs] become too dense in the absence of such disturbances, while their fine soil building eventually creates ideal terrain for woody shrubs, trees, and thus the end of the grassland altogether.

Fender’s blue caterpillars produce a little bit of nectar, which nearby ants eat. This has led over evolutionary time to a co-dependent relationship, where the ants actively protect the caterpillars. High grasses and woody shrubs however prevent the ants from finding the caterpillars, who are then preyed on by other insects.

Now the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde are being welcomed back onto these prairie landscapes to apply their [traditional burning practices], after the FWS discovered that actively managing the grasslands by removing invasive species and keeping the grass short allowed the lupines to flourish.

By restoring the lupines with sweat and fire, the butterflies have returned. There are now more than 10,000 found on the buttes of the Willamette Valley."

-via Good News Network, November 28, 2022

[aestheticallynotdeerlightful]

Thoughts and doodles

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(Please do not use, or repost my works anywhere without explicit permission from me thank you <3)

[otiksimr]

Average un-symbiosed Leafwing.

There are actually two types of leafwings, variants if you will. "Living Gardens" and "Walking Plants". This post is about the Living Garden variant.

At heart, Gardens are just that, gardens. They on average look like sticks or peculiar driftwood, and throughout their life have plants growing on them. It starts young where they have the highest chances of a complete symbiosis with a plant, When a Garden first symbioses with a plant, usually only ever one species of plant for their whole lifetime (things can get messy if there's multiple species on one dragon, the plants basically fighting each other for real-estate on the dragon). Vines and trees are by far the easiest for a Garden to symbiose with, with carnivorous plants being the hardest.

Garden families have traditions of keeping the "Family plant", with each generation either symbiosing with the same plant as their parents or the same general species.

[wodania]

little lemon tree queen

[killyridols]

wildfire no.4, by theodora allen, 2016, oil on linen, 56 x 42 inches

[moldspace]

groundbreaking new wizard technology unlocks never before seen wizard colors

[snoozchu]

poke battle ocs ! (^_^) 🔥🌿

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 196

So. Tucker might’ve done an oopsie. But it’s not his fault! How was he supposed to know you weren’t supposed to even be able to hack into the watchtower with a PDA? He uses PDAs for everything, and it’s not like it’s even hard???

…

Why are the heroes looking at him like that? 

[muffinlance]

druk gets into zukos coffee supply

"Uncle."

Uncle raised his tea cup to his lips.

"Uncle, how did he get in."

Uncle took the most delicate of sips.

"Uncle I am not turning another storeroom into tea storage."

"How unfortunate to waste the space," said Uncle. "After all, it is quite hard to keep a dragon out once they have acquired the taste!"

"Uncle."

[asoftepiloguemylove]

on memory and loss

Haruki Murakami Norwegian Wood / Call Me by Your Name (2018) dir. Luca Guadagnino / Ocean Vuong On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous / Sea Wolf The Garden That You Planted / Ocean Vuong On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous / Vladimir Nabokov / Theodore Roethke Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke / The Truman Show (1998) dir. Peter Weir / Amal El-Mohtar This is How You Lose the Time War

[acronym49]

What would it feel like, to have all of your memories erased in an instant? To watch helplessly as your mind is digested, reformed into something new. A sweet ripe strawberry with no taste of lingering bitterness.

What was it like for Foeslayer, having to do that to her own son?

(There's so much horror potential and tragedy with how his story ends and it's infesting my mind)

[anthurak]

You know one of the main reasons we should see polycules in fantasy stories? Consider settings where the ‘Power of Love’ is a real, tangible force.

Now just imagine the POWER a fully realized polycule could have.

Like we’ve seen just how much power can be generated by the love between a hero and a love-interest.

Now imagine if we take the love between the heroine and her GF, then add onto that the love between the heroine and her rival-turned-lover, AND the love between the rival and the aforementioned GF who are estranged childhood friends who have finally admitted their long-repressed feelings for each other.

Just turning a couple into a throuple potentially TRIPLES the number of potential love-generating links.

And that’s just with three people in a polycule.

A four-person polycule? That’s SIX times the potential power.

A five-person polycule is TEN times the power.

A six-person is FIFTEEN times.

You can see how this can get nutty VERY quickly.

Heck, imagine if in such a setting, the idea of polycules is initially ridiculed out of some belief that ‘love’ is some finite resource and a polycule is merely dividing up that power.

Only for the protag-polycule to prove this notion DEVASTATINGLY wrong.

[summerwages]

fireweed details...

[reunitedinterlude]

lofi phantasy: the album

track 8: plant propagation

[bogcreacher]

CHALLENGING YOU TO DRAW THE BUG DRAGONS

on it boss o7

[companion-showdown]

Who had the worst time aboard the TARDIS?

TOURNAMENT MASTERPOST