#population growth and decline

[worldpopulationday]

Committee on Social Development, Eighth Session, Day 3 - Afternoon.

The Committee will focus on four areas of social development, namely: (1) future-proofing social protection systems in Asia and the Pacific in view of key megatrends including demographic trends, climate change and digitalization to address vulnerabilities and support sustainable social development, (2) building inclusive and comprehensive social protection systems in the face of emerging challenges as well as the Action Plan to Strengthen Regional Cooperation on Social Protection in Asia and the Pacific, endorsed by the Committee in October 2020, (3) social and economic challenges and opportunities associated with slower population growth and the shift towards a greater number and share of older persons, and (4) strengthening disability-inclusive development and disability rights, as well as Implementation of the Jakarta Declaration on the Asian and Pacific Decade of Persons with Disabilities, 2023-2032.

The Eighth Session of the Committee on Social Development will be convened in-person at the United Nations Conference Centre, Bangkok, from 8 to 10 October 2024.

Watch the Committee on Social Development, Eighth Session, Day 3 - Afternoon!

[contemplatingoutlander]

This is a troubling article by UT Austin economist Dan Spears on predictions that world population growth will peak sometime during the 2060s to 2080s, and then will rapidly decline. We all know on some level that human population growth cannot continue at this pace, but the sudden drop that experts predict in the near future is alarming--as are the predicted consequences of a rapid human population decline.

This is a gift 🎁 link that will enable anyone to read the full article, whether or not they subscribe to The New York Times. Here are some excerpts from this interactive article.

The global human population has been climbing for the past two centuries. But what is normal for all of us alive today—growing up while the world is growing rapidly—may be a blip in human history. Children born today will very likely live to see the end of global population growth.A baby born this year will be 60 in the 2080s, when demographers at the U.N. expect the size of humanity to peak. The Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna places the peak in the 2070s. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington puts it in the 2060s. All of the predictions agree on one thing: We peak soon.

And then we shrink. Humanity will not reach a plateau and then stabilize. It will begin an unprecedented decline. Because most demographers look ahead only to 2100, there is no consensus on exactly how quickly populations will fall after that. Over the past 100 years, the global population quadrupled, from two billion to eight billion. As long as life continues as it has — with people choosing smaller family sizes, as is now common in most of the world — then in the 22nd or 23rd century, our decline could be just as steep as our rise.

The article goes on to say:

[...] What would happen as a consequence [of a rapid decline in human population]? Over the past 200 years, humanity’s population growth has gone hand in hand with profound advances in living standards and health: longer lives, healthier children, better education, shorter workweeks and many more improvements. Our period of progress began recently, bringing the discovery of antibiotics, the invention of electric lightbulbs, video calls with Grandma and the possibility of eradicating Guinea worm disease. In this short period, humanity has been large and growing. Economists who study growth and progress don’t think this is a coincidence. Innovations and discoveries are made by people. In a world with fewer people in it, the loss of so much human potential may threaten humanity’s continued path toward better lives.

I encourage you to read the rest of this article. Whether or not one agrees with Dr. Spears's arguments, they are thought provoking.

[edited]

____________________ Sara Chodosh created the graphics in the article, which were used to create the above gifs.

[just-in-cays]

.

[theupfish]

The world population is likely to stop growing in about a century (and not because of any doomsday scenario)

The world population is growing, yes, but the rate of that growth is slowing down. While we could reach 9 billion by 2050, that's likely to be the peak. And not because of any doomsday catastrophe; life expectancy rates are actually increasing globally, and set to continue to do so. The reason for the decline in births is due in part to women becoming more educated and empowered around the world.

By the end of the century, we may "plummet" back down to "only" 6 billion again.

So don't let anyone guilt trip you about having a large family; enough other people are choosing not to that it will even out. Have all the children you feel you can responsibly care for; it's nobody else's business.

And as for world hunger, there is already enough food in the world to feed everyone, and has been for at least twenty years; the reasons for starvation in the modern world are purely political. That itself is extremely depressing in what it suggests about humanity, but at least it's possible to feed everyone, if we can only get our sh*t together.

[memenewsdotcom]

China population drops again

[909th]

also i find the current trendiness of country music rlly interesting bc i think it reflects this mass exodus of young ppl to the south as the cost of living in big cities is rising.

[bitcoinversus]

Fact: You Can’t Make More Bitcoin, But You Can Make More Bitcoiners

In a recent viral tweet by @asanoha_gold, an image circulates with the bold statement: “You Can’t Make More Bitcoin, You Can Make More Bitcoiners.” This message captures the spirit of Bitcoin’s unique scarcity and the growing Bitcoin community. 🧡 pic.twitter.com/a2XCmaMLa8— Asanoha (@asanoha_gold) September 6, 2024 While Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21 million coins, this tweet underscores the…

[oldblogger]

“Demography is Destiny”…

… and Europe’s Destiny Dwindles. The quotation is borrowed from Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857), the reputed originator of the study of ‘sociology’, after having experienced the French Revolution. The polities of the defined continent of Europe (excluding Russia, which lies in two continents) contain 7.6% of the world’s population in 2023, as estimated by the World Factbook of the CIA. And the…

[oh-dear-so-queer]

Similarly, if homosexuality actually resulted in a significant decrease in population growth, one might expect it to be disproportionately represented among animals that are suffering a severe decline in numbers, i.e., in endangered species. However, of the 2,203 mammals and birds in the world that are currently classified as threatened (either critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable), homosexuality has been documented in just over 2 percent of these.¹⁷

17. Tallies and designations of threatened species are based on the official roster of the World Conservation Union. The three categories (critically endangered, endangered, and vulnerable) represent points along a continuum, based on a set of five quantitative criteria that encompass the species' rate of population decline, restricted geographic distribution, extent of population fluctuation, age distribution, effects of human disturbances (pollutants, introduced species, exploitation), and so on. See Baillie, J., and B. Groombridge, eds. (1996) 1996 IUCN Red List of Threatened Animals (Gland, Switzerland, and Cambridge, UK: IUCN-World Conservation Union).

"Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity" - Bruce Bagemihl

[kaberic]

Is the steady population growth coming to an end?

I have hand-picked 4 factors to understand why the world population is slowing down. And the hands of Nature is at its best which is set to resurrect the tipping human balance on Earth.

1,418,014,898 — Population of India on Monday, April 24, 2023 1,454,886,466 — Population of China as on Monday, April 24, 2023 8,029,428,824 (and turbo climbing) — World Population as on April 24, 2023 (Source: Worldometers.info) As my Motherland proudly heads to become the most populated country in the world in just a few days, we are not here to celebrate that, nor to mourn. We are here…

[notayesmanseconomics]

Italy has more worries about its budget deficits

Yesterday brought some news that raised issues for several of our economic themes. This is how it was reported by Bloomberg. Italian premier Giorgia Meloni unveiled a slightly more expansive fiscal outlook for this year, aiming for an extra sliver of economic growth through tax cuts. The euro zone’s third-biggest economy will expand 1% in 2023 under the budget plan unveiled on Tuesday, 0.1…

[worldpopulationday]

Committee on Social Development, Eighth Session (Day 1 – Afternoon).

The Eighth Session of the Committee on Social Development will be convened in-person at the United Nations Conference Centre, Bangkok, from 8 to 10 October 2024.

The Committee will focus on four areas of social development, namely: (1) future-proofing social protection systems in Asia and the Pacific in view of key megatrends including demographic trends, climate change and digitalization to address vulnerabilities and support sustainable social development, (2) building inclusive and comprehensive social protection systems in the face of emerging challenges as well as the Action Plan to Strengthen Regional Cooperation on Social Protection in Asia and the Pacific, endorsed by the Committee in October 2020, (3) social and economic challenges and opportunities associated with slower population growth and the shift towards a greater number and share of older persons, and (4) strengthening disability-inclusive development and disability rights, as well as Implementation of the Jakarta Declaration on the Asian and Pacific Decade of Persons with Disabilities, 2023-2032.

Related Sites and Documents

Committee on Social Development, Eighth Session.

Watch the Committee on Social Development, Eighth Session (Day 1 – afternoon)!

[reasonsforhope]

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is, by some measures, the most popular leader in the world. Prior to the 2024 election, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) held an outright majority in the Lok Sabha (India’s Parliament) — one that was widely projected to grow after the vote count. The party regularly boasted that it would win 400 Lok Sabha seats, easily enough to amend India’s constitution along the party's preferred Hindu nationalist lines.

But when the results were announced on Tuesday, the BJP held just 240 seats. They not only underperformed expectations, they actually lost their parliamentary majority. While Modi will remain prime minister, he will do so at the helm of a coalition government — meaning that he will depend on other parties to stay in office, making it harder to continue his ongoing assault on Indian democracy.

So what happened? Why did Indian voters deal a devastating blow to a prime minister who, by all measures, they mostly seem to like?

India is a massive country — the most populous in the world — and one of the most diverse, making its internal politics exceedingly complicated. A definitive assessment of the election would require granular data on voter breakdown across caste, class, linguistic, religious, age, and gender divides. At present, those numbers don’t exist in sufficient detail. 

But after looking at the information that is available and speaking with several leading experts on Indian politics, there are at least three conclusions that I’m comfortable drawing.

First, voters punished Modi for putting his Hindu nationalist agenda ahead of fixing India’s unequal economy. Second, Indian voters had some real concerns about the decline of liberal democracy under BJP rule. Third, the opposition parties waged a smart campaign that took advantage of Modi’s vulnerabilities on the economy and democracy.

Understanding these factors isn’t just important for Indians. The country’s election has some universal lessons for how to beat a would-be authoritarian — ones that Americans especially might want to heed heading into its election in November.

-via Vox, June 7, 2024. Article continues below.

A new (and unequal) economy

Modi’s biggest and most surprising losses came in India’s two most populous states: Uttar Pradesh in the north and Maharashtra in the west. Both states had previously been BJP strongholds — places where the party’s core tactic of pitting the Hindu majority against the Muslim minority had seemingly cemented Hindu support for Modi and his allies.

One prominent Indian analyst, Yogendra Yadav, saw the cracks in advance. Swimming against the tide of Indian media, he correctly predicted that the BJP would fall short of a governing majority.

Traveling through the country, but especially rural Uttar Pradesh, he prophesied “the return of normal politics”: that Indian voters were no longer held spellbound by Modi’s charismatic nationalist appeals and were instead starting to worry about the way politics was affecting their lives.

Yadav’s conclusions derived in no small part from hearing voters’ concerns about the economy. The issue wasn’t GDP growth — India’s is the fastest-growing economy in the world — but rather the distribution of growth’s fruits. While some of Modi’s top allies struck it rich, many ordinary Indians suffered. Nearly half of all Indians between 20 and 24 are unemployed; Indian farmers have repeatedly protested Modi policies that they felt hurt their livelihoods.

“Everyone was talking about price rise, unemployment, the state of public services, the plight of farmers, [and] the struggles of labor,” Yadav wrote...

“We know for sure that Modi’s strongman image and brassy self-confidence were not as popular with voters as the BJP assumed,” says Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies India. 

The lesson here isn’t that the pocketbook concerns trump identity-based appeals everywhere; recent evidence in wealthier democracies suggests the opposite is true. Rather, it’s that even entrenched reputations of populist leaders are not unshakeable. When they make errors, even some time ago, it’s possible to get voters to remember these mistakes and prioritize them over whatever culture war the populist is peddling at the moment.

Liberalism strikes back

The Indian constitution is a liberal document: It guarantees equality of all citizens and enshrines measures designed to enshrine said equality into law. The signature goal of Modi’s time in power has been to rip this liberal edifice down and replace it with a Hindu nationalist model that pushes non-Hindus to the social margins. In pursuit of this agenda, the BJP has concentrated power in Modi’s hands and undermined key pillars of Indian democracy (like a free press and independent judiciary).

Prior to the election, there was a sense that Indian voters either didn’t much care about the assault on liberal democracy or mostly agreed with it. But the BJP’s surprising underperformance suggests otherwise.

The Hindu, a leading Indian newspaper, published an essential post-election data analysis breaking down what we know about the results. One of the more striking findings is that the opposition parties surged in parliamentary seats reserved for members of “scheduled castes” — the legal term for Dalits, the lowest caste grouping in the Hindu hierarchy.

Caste has long been an essential cleavage in Indian politics, with Dalits typically favoring the left-wing Congress party over the BJP (long seen as an upper-caste party). Under Modi, the BJP had seemingly tamped down on the salience of class by elevating all Hindus — including Dalits — over Muslims. Yet now it’s looking like Dalits were flocking back to Congress and its allies. Why?

According to experts, Dalit voters feared the consequences of a BJP landslide. If Modi’s party achieved its 400-seat target, they’d have more than enough votes to amend India’s constitution. Since the constitution contains several protections designed to promote Dalit equality — including a first-in-the-world affirmative action system — that seemed like a serious threat to the community. It seems, at least based on preliminary data, that they voted accordingly.

The Dalit vote is but one example of the ways in which Modi’s brazen willingness to assail Indian institutions likely alienated voters.

Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s largest and most electorally important state, was the site of a major BJP anti-Muslim campaign. It unofficially kicked off its campaign in the UP city of Ayodhya earlier this year, during a ceremony celebrating one of Modi’s crowning achievements: the construction of a Hindu temple on the site of a former mosque that had been torn down by Hindu nationalists in 1992. 

Yet not only did the BJP lose UP, it specifically lost the constituency — the city of Faizabad — in which the Ayodhya temple is located. It’s as direct an electoral rebuke to BJP ideology as one can imagine.

In Maharashtra, the second largest state, the BJP made a tactical alliance with a local politician, Ajit Pawar, facing serious corruption charges. Voters seemingly punished Modi’s party for turning a blind eye to Pawar’s offenses against the public trust. Across the country, Muslim voters turned out for the opposition to defend their rights against Modi’s attacks.

The global lesson here is clear: Even popular authoritarians can overreach.

By turning “400 seats” into a campaign slogan, an all-but-open signal that he intended to remake the Indian state in his illiberal image, Modi practically rang an alarm bell for constituencies worried about the consequences. So they turned out to stop him en masse.

The BJP’s electoral underperformance is, in no small part, the direct result of their leader’s zealotry going too far.

Return of the Gandhis? 

Of course, Modi’s mistakes might not have mattered had his rivals failed to capitalize. The Indian opposition, however, was far more effective than most observers anticipated.

Perhaps most importantly, the many opposition parties coordinated with each other. Forming a united bloc called INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance), they worked to make sure they weren’t stealing votes from each other in critical constituencies, positioning INDIA coalition candidates to win straight fights against BJP rivals.

The leading party in the opposition bloc — Congress — was also more put together than people thought. Its most prominent leader, Rahul Gandhi, was widely dismissed as a dilettante nepo baby: a pale imitation of his father Rajiv and grandmother Indira, both former Congress prime ministers. Now his critics are rethinking things.

“I owe Rahul Gandhi an apology because I seriously underestimated him,” says Manjari Miller, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Miller singled out Gandhi’s yatras (marches) across India as a particularly canny tactic. These physically grueling voyages across the length and breadth of India showed that he wasn’t just a privileged son of Indian political royalty, but a politician willing to take risks and meet ordinary Indians where they were. During the yatras, he would meet directly with voters from marginalized groups and rail against Modi’s politics of hate.

“The persona he’s developed — as somebody kind, caring, inclusive, [and] resolute in the face of bullying — has really worked and captured the imagination of younger India,” says Suryanarayan. “If you’ve spent any time on Instagram Reels, [you’ll see] an entire generation now waking up to Rahul Gandhi’s very appealing videos.”

This, too, has a lesson for the rest of the world: Tactical innovation from the opposition matters even in an unfair electoral context.

There is no doubt that, in the past 10 years, the BJP stacked the political deck against its opponents. They consolidated control over large chunks of the national media, changed campaign finance law to favor themselves, suborned the famously independent Indian Electoral Commission, and even intimidated the Supreme Court into letting them get away with it. 

The opposition, though, managed to find ways to compete even under unfair circumstances. Strategic coordination between them helped consolidate resources and ameliorate the BJP cash advantage. Direct voter outreach like the yatra helped circumvent BJP dominance in the national media.

To be clear, the opposition still did not win a majority. Modi will have a third term in office, likely thanks in large part to the ways he rigged the system in his favor.

Yet there is no doubt that the opposition deserves to celebrate. Modi’s power has been constrained and the myth of his invincibility wounded, perhaps mortally. Indian voters, like those in Brazil and Poland before them, have dealt a major blow to their homegrown authoritarian faction.

And that is something worth celebrating.

-via Vox, June 7, 2024.

[laurelsofhighever]

And you know what else bothers me? The sanitisation of characters and setting in Veilguard is so complete that not even Assan escapes it. I'm currently rereading Last Flight for fic reasons and it really hits how differently griffons are portrayed in the novel compared to Assan, who has basically taken on the role of a Disney animal sidekick. In the book, griffons are proud, territorial, and fierce. They demand absolute devotion from their riders, they have to be fed separately to avoid fights breaking out, they can outmanoeuvre an archdemon and punch darkspawn hard enough with their talons to break necks.

And yes, Assan is still growing, it's possible the fierce territoriality won't hit until he reaches adulthood and his easy affection could be either his immaturity or his individual personality, but he's still an apex hypercarnivore whose two constituent parts are also apex hypercarnivores. Taking him into Arlathan should result in a massive decline in the local nug population as he practices his hunting skills, and Davrin should be learning how to manage his flying weight the way falconers do with their birds, because apex predators don't exert themselves when their bellies are full. That halla should have been put out of its misery. At full growth he'll be eating a goat a day at least. He should not be being fed yams or carrots.

[dougdimmadodo]

Cool Zoology Stories of 2024

Happy new year! As we head into 2025, here's a few fun zoology highlights from the last year.

The Iberian Lynx is no longer endgangered

Species Concerned: Iberian Lynx (Lynx pardinus)

Source: Here

Image Source: Here

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is the organisation responsible for compiling information on the size and trends seen in species’ wild populations and assigning them a “conservation status” based on how threatened they are determine to be. There are three increasingly concerning categories a species may be sorted into (vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered, in that order,) and while species may be classified as increasingly threatened if their populations continue to decline they can also be raised to a less threatened category should their population increase. In the summer of 2024, the IUCN made an exciting announcement; based on an assessment carried out throughout 2023 the Iberian Lynx (the most threatened of the four lynx species, and among the world’s rarest wildcats) had done just that, being upgraded to vulnerable from endangered!

Easily distinguished from other lynxes by it’s the distinctive pair of “beard-like” fur tufts on its chin, the Iberian Lynx, as its name suggests, is found only in the southern Iberian Peninsula which stretches across Spain and Portugal. Its already small range has shrunk further due to rapid declines in its primary prey, the European Rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus), further aggravated by habitat loss, disease outbreaks, conflict with humans and the addition genetic pressures that species with small populations experience. By 2001 the species’ population had declined to as few 62 adults, but since then intensive efforts to increase the populations of European Rabbits, protect remaining Iberian Lynx populations, introduce captive-bred individuals and encourage land owners to reduce impacts on any lynx populations on their land has allowed for a steady increase – as of 2023 the population was believed to have risen to 648 adults, and members of this species have returned to long-vacant regions of their former range! While the Iberian Lynx remains threatened and continued efforts are needed to maintain these increases, the species’ new conservation status shows that these efforts are working, and that there may yet be hope for this beardy big cat’s future.

Big News on Baby Sharks!

Species Concerned: Great White Shark (Carcharodon carcharias)

Source: Here

Image Source: Here

Despite its large size, near-cosmopolitan distribution and status as easily one of the most famous and recognisable fish on earth, there’s a lot we don’t know about the Great White Shark. In particular, there are some major gaps in our understandings of the mating habits of adult Great Whites, and in the early development of their pups. This year, however, progress was made in filling some of these gaps; in April an article published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science described activity within a “creche” of young (1-6 year old) Great Whites off the coast of California, demonstrating that (among other things) they moved between deeper and shallower coastal waters throughout the day and seemed to carefully position themselves within the water column in order to maintain a healthy body temperature and thereby facilitate growth and development (unlike many fish adult Great White Sharks are able to regulate their body temperature through metabolic activity much like mammals can, but it seems that younger individuals have a reduced ability to do so and are more reliant on environmental conditions to regulate their body temperatures. This is particularly exciting as an article published this January to another journal, Environmental Biology of Fishes critically examined footage recorded by wildlife photographer TheMalibuaArtist of a small, round-featured Great White Shark off also found near California’s coast that had an odd, pale film attached to its skin and concluded that (while it is possible that the film is the result of some previously undocumented disease or mutation) it may represent the first ever video footage of a newborn Great White Shark, with the film being debris that attached to the potential pup during live birth. The Great White Shark, despite its dreaded reputation, is itself classified as vulnerable by the IUCN, so gaining greater understanding of how members of these species live in their earliest years may prove invaluable in protecting wider populations!

The 200th Anniversary of the First Dinosaur Getting Named

Species Concerned: Megalosaurus (Megalosaurus bucklandii)

Source: Here

Image Source (excluding some...minor additions): Here

On February 20th 1824 the geologist and palaeontologist William Buckland became the first person to give a formal scientific name to a (non-avian) dinosaur, describing a set 160 million year old reptile-like bones found in Oxfordshire, England as “Megalosaurus”, which can be translated literally to “big lizard” (though is more often translated as the more dignified-sounding “great lizard.”) This means that this February marked the 200th anniversary of Megalosaurus getting its name and, in some ways, the beginning humanity’s long-standing love of and obsession with dinosaurs.

Based on the incomplete remains that had been discovered Buckland originally imagined Megalosaurus as being an enormous, slow-moving, lizard-like animal (kind of like an iguana crossed with an elephant.) However, further studies into the fossils of Megalosaurus and of numerous anatomically similar and therefore likely related animals have since demonstrated that it was a large, likely relatively fast-moving carnivorous biped, and a relative of modern birds (which, like Megalosaurus, are therapods.) Megalosaurus lived in what is now northern Europe throughout the mid-Jurassic period, while its closest relatives, the Megalosaurids, could also be found across Africa, Asia and North America and survived until the very end of the Jurassic. 17 years after Megalosaurus got its name it, alongside the early cretaceous ankylosaur Hylaeosaurus and the iconic spiky-thumbed ornithopod Iguanadon (all still imagined to be iguana-like at the time) would be recognised as relatives of one another based on similar anatomical features, becoming the first three genera to be classified as part of the clade that today contains all dinosaurs, the Dinosauria.

The Golden-Crested Helmetshrike was Photographed for the First Time

Species Concerned: Golden-Crested Helmetshrike (Prionops alberti)

Source: Here

Image Source: Here

Between December 2023 and January 2024 a collaborative team of researchers from the Democratic Republic of Congo and the USA set out to document the wildlife living in the Itombwe mountain region of South Kivu, DOC. Records of the species present in an around Itombwe are limited and every observation made during the trip was valuable, but perhaps the most exciting was the several sightings of the Yellow-Crested Helmetshrike, marking the first time this species has been formerly recorded in nearly 20 years and allowing for it to be photographed for the first time ever!

While several potential sightings have been reported elsewhere in central Africa, the Golden-Crested Helmetshrike is believed to be endemic to the DOC, making its home mainly in humid forests at high altitudes. Immediately distinguished from other birds in their range by the titular crests of bright yellow feathers that runs across their heads, members of this species live in small flocks and are extremely agile in flight, using their agility to hunt airborne insects. A lack of internationally available documented sightings of this species since the early 2000s had led to fears of its potential extinction, but as at least 18 individuals were sighted during the team’s expedition the species is now known not only to be surviving, but potentially to be more abundant within its home range than previously thought!

Frogs and Wolves got in on Pollination

Species Concerned: Izecksohn's Brazilian Tree Frog (Xenohyla truncata) and Ethiopian Wolf (Canis simensis)

Sources: Here and Here

Image Sources: Here and Here

Insects are by far the most important pollinators on earth (with some 80% of plants relying on insect-based pollination to reproduce,) but there are also many important vertebrate pollinators (most notably nectar-drinking bats and birds.) Pollinating vertebrates are important not only to wild plants but also to crops, wit mangos, durians and bananas all relying heavily on vertebrates to spread their pollen. 2024 saw two surprising new additions to the list of potential vertebrate pollinators; the unusual Izecksohn's Brazilian Tree Frog and the endangered Ethiopian Wolf!

Found only in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, Izecksohn's Brazilian Tree Frog is unusual among frogs in that while almost all frogs are carnivorous members of this species prominently feed on fruit and nectar. Like other nectar-feeding animals, as they move between flowers they carry pollen with them, making them the only known amphibian pollinators. The Ethiopian Wolf, native to high-altitude regions of Ethiopia, is among the rarest wild dogs on earth and has typically been thought of as a strict carnivore. In November of 2024, however, members of this species were recorded feeding on the flowers of the Red Hot Poker Plant (Kniphofia foliosa), transferring pollen on their muzzles in the process. While further studies are needed to determine quite how important either species is in pollination, it still suggests that the number of pollinating vertebrate species in the world may be greater than previously thought!

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Have a great new year!

[hotwifeky1]

I can’t help but feel so much hope and love for what’s happening. The steady decline in the white population growth rate feels like a shift toward a more just and desirable world. One where black and brown people will truly thrive. This isn’t about fear or loss, it’s about celebrating the richness of the culture and breaking free from the systems of white supremacy.

We need to keep working toward a future where every Black, Indigenous, and person of color can live with the dignity, power, and opportunity they deserve. This is how we build the new world. Love to all who are fighting for that!