#pnw wildlife

[natureisthegreatestartist]

What pretty shells. Who do they belong to? Pacific sideband snails (Monadenia fidelis), which are native to the Pacific Northwest.

[willoftrees]

finally managed to snap the local elk herd!

kept a respectable distance as not startle them~

[weirdcreaturefeed]

Weird Creature of the Day: Bleeding tooth/Devil's tooth fungus

CW: Trypophobia, hemophobia. It's covered in holes that look like they're bleeding, which might be unpleasant to look at for some.

Yeow, that's a rough case of gingivitis! It's Hydnellum peckii!

The blood-like fluid they excrete when the fruiting bodies are younger is theorized to protect them from predators or to attract insects to assist in spreading their spores. It's produced when the root system of the fungus absorbs too much rainwater and pushes the excess out through the visible mushroom portion of the the organism.

The "tooth" part of their common name comes from the small tooth-esque protrusions on the underside of the fruiting bodies, which release their spores.

They're widespread across North America but particularly common in the Pacific Northwest, and often found among fir, pine, and other woods. It has also been found in Scotland and Germany, and more recently in Iran and Korea. There are populations on the decline in the Czech Republic, Norway, and the Netherlands. It is suspected that pollution and deforestation are the cause of the increased rarity in these areas. They build mycorrhizal relationships with the root networks (as far as 11 feet/3.4 meters away from the fruiting bodies!) of coniferous trees around them. I would like to join them.

They're not dangerous to eat but they taste downright awful. I keep on finding words like "acrid" and "bitter" if that gives you an idea.

They're valued for their dying capabilities. Different dye recipes with this fungus can produce ranges of brown, green, and blue. (Natural dyes are cool please talk to me about natural dyes)

This was very fun for me to find out because its common names were made up well before we learned this: the "blood" (or more specifically its red pigments) possess a sizeable amount of an anticoagulant compound! Isn't it funny how things work out sometimes? The anticoagulant is called atromentin, and it's very similar to a frequently used blood thinning medication called heparin. Atromentin is only found in certain types of fungi (Agaricales and Thelephorales classes), and heparin is only found in certain animals (humans, whales, salmon, shrimp, turkeys, others). It's just fascinating to me that we as humans are still so in sync with not only our Animalia peers, but our even more distant relatives in the Fungi kingdom as well.

Reminder that mycelium is cool and fucked up, why does it look like this

Photo: Bernypisa [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

[pnwander]

[rebeccathenaturalist]

If you aren't following the news here in the Pacific Northwest, this is a very, very big deal. Our native salmon numbers have been plummeting over the past century and change. First it was due to overfishing by commercial canneries, then the dams went in and slowed the rivers down and blocked the salmons' migratory paths. More recently climate change is warming the water even more than the slower river flows have, and salmon can easily die of overheating in temperatures we would consider comfortable.

Removing the dams will allow the Klamath River and its tributaries to return to their natural states, making them more hospitable to salmon and other native wildlife (the reservoirs created by the dams were full of non-native fish stocked there over the years.) Not only will this help the salmon thrive, but it makes the entire ecosystem in the region more resilient. The nutrients that salmon bring back from their years in the ocean, stored within their flesh and bones, works its way through the surrounding forest and can be traced in plants several miles from the river.

This is also a victory for the Yurok, Karuk, and other indigenous people who have relied on the Klamath for many generations. The salmon aren't just a crucial source of food, but also deeply ingrained in indigenous cultures. It's a small step toward righting one of the many wrongs that indigenous people in the Americas have suffered for centuries.

[seabeck]

Bald eagle in the fog

[orofeaiel]

Grazing

[organicmatter]

northern flicker, photo by Loi Nguyen

[crows-before-bros]

Exposure was set too high because I was taking crow pictures so I doubt I can get the sky to be less bright, but check out this dinosaur.

[mcromwell]

If you're as excited as me and @echomary about seeing a rough skinned newt then chances are we're friend material (sound on)

[starbirdpnw]

Glad to made it to Skagit for the shorties. Always fun and pleasure to watch and photograph.

[theodorenussphotography]

More of the Strawberry Hill seals

[pnwnativeplants]

What plants support the most bee biodiversity!

(Source)

[pnwander]

steller's jay

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Welcome to my Tuesday morning PSA about plastics!

So--I was walking along the Bolstadt beach approach sidewalk here in Long Beach, WA yesterday afternoon, and I started seeing these little orange pellets on the ground that looked a little bit like salmon roe (but probably weren't). So I picked one up, and it was most definitely rubber. I went around picking up every one I could find, and while I didn't keep exact count I probably amassed 50-60 of them. I took this picture before depositing them in the nearest trash can.

These are airsoft gun pellets, and you can buy them in big jars containing thousands of them. That means that someone who decided that the beach was a great place to shoot their airsoft guns could easily litter the place with countless little bits of plastic rubber in less than an hour. We already have a huge problem here with people leaving trash, including tiny bits of plastic, all over the beach (you should see the gigantic mess after 4th of July fireworks when thousands of people come in from out of town, blow things up, and then leave again without picking up after themselves.)

But these airsoft pellets have a particularly nasty side effect. You know how my first thought was "wow, those look kind of like salmon roe?" Well, we have a number of opportunistic omnivore birds like crows, ravens, and several species of gull that commonly scavenge on the beach, especially along the approaches because people often feed them there. If I can catch the resemblance of an orange airsoft pellet to a fish egg, then chances are there are wildlife that will assume they're edible.

Since birds don't chew their food, they probably won't notice that the taste or texture is wrong--it'll just go down the hatch. And since they can't digest the pellets, there's a good chance they might just build up in the bird's digestive system, especially if the bird eats a large number of them--say, fifty or sixty of them dropped on the ground along the same fifty foot stretch of sidewalk. The bird might die of starvation if there's not enough capacity for food in their stomach--or they might just die painfully of an impacted gut, and no way to get help for it. If the pellets end up washed into the ocean, you get the same issue with fish and other marine wildlife eating them, and then of course the pellets eventually breaking up into microplastic particles.

You can get biodegradable airsoft pellets; they appear to mainly be gray or white in color rather than bright screaming orange and green. But "biodegradable" doesn't mean "instantly dissolves the next time it rains." An Amazon listing for Aim Green biodegradable airsoft pellets advertise them as "Our biodegradable BBs are engineered to degrade only with long-term exposure to water and sun and will degrade 180 days after being used." That's half a year for them to be eaten by wildlife.

I don't know, y'all. That handful of carelessly dropped rubber pellets just encapsulates how much people don't factor in the rest of nature when making decisions, even on something that is purely for entertainment like an airsoft gun. We could have had a lot of the same technological advances we have today, but with much less environmental impact, if we had considered the long-term effects on both other people and other living beings, as well as our habitats. We could have found ways from the beginning to make these things in ways that benefited us but also mitigated any harm as much as possible. Instead we're now having to reverse-engineer things we've been using for decades, and sometimes--like the "biodegradable" airsoft pellets--they still have a significant negative impact.

But--at least there are people trying to do things better, thinking ahead instead of just on immediate profit. We're stuck in a heck of a mess here, figuratively and literally, and changing an entire system can't be done in a day. Maybe we can at least keep pushing for a cultural shift that emphasizes planning far into the future--if not the often-cited "seven generations ahead", then at least throughout the potential lifespan of a given product.

[seabeck]

All masked up