#sea purslane

[itsoctopuses]

Week 2 observations:

1.8.25

Crimson bottlebrush

Melaleuca citrina

In the Myrtle family. Native to Australia and apparently one of the first plants to be taken from Australia. It is hardy and is on the federal noxious weeds list. I find that interesting since it’s been planted in my complex. Surely, native plants could look just as good 🤷🏻‍♀️

Observed at home on Galveston Island 1.6.25 & 1.8.25.

#crimsonbottlebrush #Melaleucacitrina #citizenscience #nature #outdoors #pest #january #january8 #2025 #picoftheday #project365 #day8

1.9.25

Blue-tailed Damselfly

Ischnura elegans

This might be an adult male. It is a European species.

Observed on Galveston Island Seawall on 1.5.25.

I stopped to get pictures of the front over the water and this little guy landed for a quick rest.

#bluetaileddamselfly #Ischnuraelegans #citizenscience #storm #beach #insect #nature #outdoors #january #january9 #2025 #picoftheday #project365 #day9

1.10.25

Prickly Sowthistle

Sonchus asper

Another invasive species here in Texas. It’s native to Eurasia, is in the same tribe as the dandelion and is edible though you’d want to attempt this with a young plant before it gets too spiny!

Observed at Galveston Island State Park on 1.10.25.

I had fun capturing it’s reflection

#pricklysowthistle #Sonchusasper #citizenscience #nature #outdoors #invasive #flora #january #january10 #2025 #picoftheday #project365 #day10

1.11.25

Gulf Coast Toad

Incilius valliceps

They are 1 of 10 true toads in Texas. They are native to Texas. This could be a young female.

Observed at Galveston Island State Park on 1.11.25.

I picked 3 large fire ants off this poor toad!!

#gulfcoasttoad #Inciliusvalliceps #citizenscience #nature #outdoors #truetoad #january #january11 #2025 #picoftheday #project365 #day11

1.12.25

Sea Purslane

Sesuvium portulacastrum

It was raining all day so I didn’t get a chance to get something today. This was observed 1.11.25 at Galveston Island State Park.

It is native to Texas and much of the world. Also has naturalized in places it’s been introduced. It’s a sprawling perennial herb used in food and medicine around the world. They even pickle it in the Philippines!

#seapurslane #Sesuviumportulacastrum #citizenscience #beach #herb #flora #nature #outdoors #january #january12 #2025 #picoftheday #project365 #day12

1.13.25

Sanderling

Calidris alba

Observed on Galveston Island 1.13.25.

Because it’s in its non breeding winter plumage I don’t know if it’s a male or female.

They can travel great distances to their breeding grounds.

They run along the beach, “chasing waves” and feel on invertebrates buried in the sand.

#sanderling #Calidrisalba #citizenscience #bird #beach #nature #outdoors #january #january13 #2025 #picoftheday #project365 #day13

1.14.25

Surinam cockroach

Pycnoscelus surinamensis

This is an invasive species to Texas and other regions coming from the Indomalayan region. It is not considered an indoor pest though you might find one occasionally in your home. They are also referred to as the greenhouse cockroach. It burrows in loose soil and will come out at night to eat soft plants. They are almost all female having evolved to reproduce parthenogenetically, where the embryos develop from unfertilized eggs.

Some critters will show me getting out of my comfort zone and this is one of those times. I hate roaches but I want to show more than just the “pretty” side of nature. This was observed at Galveston Island state park 1.3.25

#surinamcockroach #Pycnoscelussurinamensis #citizenscience #insect #nature #outdoors #january #january14 #2025 #picoftheday #project365 #day14

[morethansalad]

Silician Purslane Salad (Vegan)

[he-of-the-waves]

Purslane is nice...

Hello there wizard island island... I washed up here the other day and I just wanna say hi. I have no name, I'm 14, and I don't know how I got here, the waves keep telling me it's some kind of secret and I trust them so... I guess it's okay! Come by and maybe we can build some sand castles together...

[madamlaydebug]

The foods within the States that create the least amount of mucus in the body. VEGETABLES

* Amaranth greens – same as Callaloo, a variety of Spinach

* Avocado

* Bell Peppers

* Chayote (Mexican Squash)

* Cucumber

* Dandelion greens

* Garbanzo beans

* Green banana

* Izote – cactus flower/ cactus leaf

* Kale

* Lettuce (all, except Iceberg)

* Mushrooms (all, except Shiitake)

* Nopales (Mexican Cactus

* Okra seasonal * Olives (not soaked in vinegar)

* Onions

* Poke salad – greens

* Purslane (Verdolaga)

* Sea Vegetables (wakame/dulse/arame/hijiki/nori)

* Squash - except pumpkin

* Tomato – cherry & plum/roma only

* Tomatillo

* Turnip greens

* Watercress

* Zucchini

FRUITS

(No canned or seedless fruits)

* Apples

* Bananas – the smallest one or the Burro/mid-size (original banana)

* Berries – all varieties – no cranberries

* Cantaloupe

* Cherries

* Currants

* Dates

* Figs

* Grapes – Seeded

* Limes (key limes preferred with seeds)

* Mango

* Melons – Seeded

* Orange (Seville or sour preferred)

* Papayas

* Peaches

* Pear

* Plums

* Prickly Pear (Cactus Fruit)

* Prunes

* Raisins – Seeded

* Soft Jelly Coconuts

* Soursops – (Latin or West Indian markets)

* Tamarind

GRAINS

* Amaranth

* Fonio

* Kamut

* Quinoa

* Rye

* Spelt

* Teff

* Wild Rice

NUTS & SEEDS

* Hemp seeds

* Raw sesame seeds

* Raw sesame seeds /tahini butter

* Walnuts

* Brazil nuts

OILS

* Coconut oil (do not cook)

* Olive oil (do not cook)

* Avocado oil

* Grapeseed oil

* Hempseed oil

* Sesame seed oil

SPICES AND SEASONINGS

MILD FLAVORS

* Basil

* Bay leaf

* Cloves

* Dill

* Oregano

* Savory

* Sweet Basil

* Tarragon

* Thyme

SALTY FLAVORS

* Pure Sea Salt

* Powdered Granulated Seaweed -(Kelp/Dulce/Nori – has “sea taste”)

SWEET FLAVORS

* 100% Pure Agave Syrup – (from cactus)

* Date Sugar/Syrup

PUNGENT AND SPICY FLAVORS

* Achiote

* Cayenne/ African Bird Pepper

* Culantro * Habanero

* Onion Powder

* Sage

HERBAL TEAS

* Anise

* Burdock

* Chamomile

* Elderberry

* Fennel

* Ginger

* Raspberry

* Sarsaparilla

* Tila (Linden flower)

* Valerian

[todaysbug]

October 11th, 2023

Attractive Running Crab Spider (Rhysodromus histrio)

Class: Arachnida

Distribution: North America, Europe, Turkey, Caucasus, Russia (from Europe to Far East), Central Asia and China.

Habitat: Occurs on plants, weeds and tall grasses, especially heather and sagebrush. More common on heathland, but can also be found on saltmarsh and other grasslands.

Diet: Active predator; feeds on invertebrates.

Description: There are two colour varieties of R. histrio, varying by habitat; the most common coloration is of a reddish-brown, providing ample camouflage against yellow grasses and brown stems of grasslands, though those found living on saltmarshes in Essex were found to be bluish-green, of a similar color to the sea purslane herb Atripex portulacoides found in the region. Their body is said to have a crab-like appearance due to the orientation of their first pair of legs, which are oriented sideways; for this reason, R. histrio is considered to be a false crab spider.

Adults usually occur in early summer, where females will enclose their egg sacs in silk and dried heather, and guard them until they hatch. They can also be found in late summer to early fall. Due to the steady disappearances of heathland to forestation and development, R. histrio populations have declined over the years, but are still considered secure.

(First picture by me, second by Steven Mlodinow)

[eldritchbean-shapeshifter]

Forms of the Bean - Masterpost 4

Continued list of all my different forms/sonas. Does not (usually) include mixed/blended forms.

Geode

Eyeball head

Melanistic Rock Pigeon (Columba livia)

Griffin

Gargoyle

Yellow-banded Poison Dart Frog (Dendrobates leucomelas)

Gingerbread cookie

Soot sprite

Boom box

“Witch”

Squishy silicone cat lamp

Clock

Moon Jellyfish (Aurelia aurita)

Montmorency Cherry (Prunus cerasus)

Coyote (Canis latrans)

Kitsune

Tanuki (Nyctereutes viverrinus)

Moth[person]

Enderman

Mule Deer (Odocoileus hemionus)

Southern Flannel Moth (Megalopyge opercularis)

Purslane (Portulaca oleracea)

Cottonmouth (Agkistrodon piscivorus)

Cholera - the disease AND the bacteria (Vibrio cholerae)

Fluffy owl thingie

Forsythia (Forsythia suspensa)

Deep Sea Leviathan

Barnacle Goose (Branta leucopsis)

Inland Taipan (Oxyuranus microlepidotus)

Night Fury

Masterpost pt5

[uselessfish]

Fagonia

Tribulus

Sea purslane

False daisy

[foodies-channel]

🍥 Aged dark choc, olive oil and orange delice, cardamom white choc aero, burnt orange honey, extra virgin olive oil granita and sea purslane

🍔YouTube || 🍟Reddit

[sea-salt-heart]

Sea Purslane over the dead branches - Cuba.

[quotesfrommyreading]

For me, the marshes of Essex feel akin to its soul. When I think of home, the first things I picture are these uncategorisable plains of spongy vegetation that could seem menacing in the right light, with reeds and samphire sprouting from a dark, glistening mud, where wading migrant birds stalk on the lookout for food. Grassy sea walls. Reclaimed munitions dumps. Flat fields with pillboxes and all that mud. A terrain sliced by creeks, accented by sluices and characterised by a great gloop that can remind folk that they are never far from the primordial.

And yet, the ambiguity and unstable nature of once-malarial marshlands led to their ruin. On a family picnic one beautiful and hot spring day on Two Tree Island, a nature reserve at the edge of the Thames estuary, my three-year-old daughter, Greta, kept asking “What’s that?” whenever she spotted the thick brown bottoms of beer bottles, 1980s Tesco bags or old shoes – so many shoes – protruding out of the dry ground. It was a surreal detail from a pleasant trip that I might once have laughed off, but now, accompanied by my children, it felt like a bad dream.

In some places, however, the matter that London no longer wanted has been used in productive and creative ways. An artificial hill in an old metropolitan Essex area of east London, formed from a huge heap of toxic spoil dumped by the old gas works, has been known for years as the Beckton Alp. Its most imaginative use was as a dry ski slope, opened in 1989 by Diana, Princess of Wales.

The RSPB used more than 3m tonnes of material excavated from Crossrail’s tunnel digs to raise part of Wallasea Island at the mouth of the Thames by an average of 1.5 metres, transforming farmland into a coastal marshland haven for egrets and oystercatchers and creating lagoons across 670 hectares.

Mucking Marsh was named a site of special scientific interest in 1991, owing to the populations of shelduck, grey plover, dunlin, black-tailed godwit and redshank that roosted on the salt marsh, and the abundance of vegetation such as sea purslane and sea aster, not to mention rare spiders, but it continued to be used for rubbish disposal until 2012. (A third of all coastal historical landfills are located near designated ecological sites.) Mucking’s conversion into a nature reserve, which was opened by David Attenborough in 2013, was partly financed by almost £3m in funds from DP World, the Dubai-owned company that built the London Gateway port nearby, and Enovert, a waste management company that used to use the site for dumping. The site at Pitsea is earmarked to be transformed by the RSPB in the next decade.

Further east, the landfill site at Two Tree Island in Leigh-on-Sea was converted back into public land in the 1970s. Now blackberries, apples, pears, damsons, plums and cherries all grow here. People come to swim in the water at Leigh, where there are also wild food foraging clubs. A local chef, John Lawson, has written about how his love for foraging was ignited by sourcing samphire fresh from Two Tree Island. But Spencer was alarmed by environmental reports for Two Tree Island that identified cyanide on the site. She didn’t even want to take samples back to the lab.

In 2017, Spencer wrote a report with her colleague at QMUL, Dr James H Brand, on the risk of pollution from historic coastal sites at risk of flooding or erosion for the Environment Agency, based on research into Leigh Marsh, used as a site for dumping between 1955 and 1967, and Hadleigh Marsh just a little way west, which was active during the 1980s. They analysed waste and soil-like material from the landfill. Some of the samples were found to have lead concentrations more than 12 times the recommended level for good ecological health.

Leaching of chemicals and other harmful substances from landfill is liable to increase with sea level rise. But it isn’t just coastal erosion that is breaching the deposits of trash. It is the effects of curiosity, too. Bottle Beach is popular with the mudlarking community, a burgeoning group of amateur historians and curious walkers who come and dig through the rubbish, burrowing holes into the scrub to find trinkets. We came across old 20th-century booze and medicine bottles in lines, as if they had been filed for consideration by a digger but didn’t make the final cut. There were certain people Spencer saw regularly “sitting in a toxic hole” eating sandwiches after digging like a mole into heavily contaminated earth with no gloves on. “‘Well, I’m fine,’ they’d say. ‘I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.’ But then asbestos takes 40 years to take hold.”

  —  The rubbishscapes of Essex: why our buried trash is back to haunt us

[tidelure]

AT THE SKIRT OF THE LIGHTHOUSE IN THE DARK OF THE NIGHT, MARUKA REJOINS WITH THE SEA.  ╱ feat. @purslanes

in the distance sits a car, engine still running and the lights left on. in the dark, the yellow glow from the front window stares as one great unblinking eye, condensation from the interior heat fogging up the glass until it looks on the border of tears. maruka has kept it that way for the sake of sanctuary, a warm place to return to after her dive. so all that will occur is, in some distant way, tied to her own finger ⸺ violence always is.

her folly is that she forgets that every eye has its equivalent half, and that in creating one she had necessitated the joining of another. it's her mistake not to assess the lighthouse, with its eternal blaze, as the auxiliary light. the secondary eye. she strips her clothes on the beach and leaves them on the rocks, stepping past the waves in only the secondary skin of a slip dress. it will bite her out there, the cold: the freeze of a rhode island near-winter as real as a set of gnashing teeth. she does not mind. she never has. maruka slips under the water, mouth open: salt on salt, teeth on teeth. a homecoming. under the moonlight, her wet hair glows so black it is blue, her body so white against the dark it turns pearlescent.

across the way, the light of her car momentarily shudders ⸺ blinks, then returns to itself ⸺ as if someone is squinting with one eye, looking through a spyglass.

as if someone is trying to get a better look.

[morethansalad]

A Seasonal Green Salad (Vegan)

[iffoundreturntosea]

August 27, Day 239/240

Day 239 2015

Throwback Thursday to two weeks ago!

#tbt #twoweeksago #theocean #thegulfofmexico #water #beautiful #wannagoback #picoftheday #project365 #day239

Day 240 2016

Happy birthday, Dad!!

#happybirthday #dad #love #orange #shadesoforange #august #picoftheday #project365 #day240

Day 239 2017

This is the damage I was left with after Ike went through Galveston. I lost a lot. Some times I still have to remind myself that it was just stuff. To all my friends and family that are being harassed by Harvey I love you and I want you to be smart not stupid. Mother Nature is both giving and unforgiving. I love you all.

#hurricanedamage #itsjuststuff #besafe #besmart #nature #natureconquers #august #picoftheday #project365 #day239

Day 239 2018

Wishing I could help celebrate my Dad’s birthday with him in Kauai but I’m sure he’s got it handled! Happy birthday, Dad!

#happybirthday #kauai #hawaii #beach #sand #water #ocean #snorkeling #fins #bekind #bekindtooneanother #walkinsomeoneelsesshoes #august #picoftheday #project365 #day239

Day 239 2019

Double Trouble

#kitty #cat #leo #meow #catsofinstagram #reflection #double #glass #nationaljustbeacauseday #august #august27 #2019 #nationalday #nationaldaycalendar #picoftheday #project365 #day239

Day 240 2020

I don't care for this type of texturing on wall but it makes for a nice shot.

#wall #upclose #macro #ridges #canyoufeelit #blue #light #shadows #texturing #texture #august #august27 #2020 #picoftheday #project365 #day240

Day 239 2021

Happy I was able to celebrate my Dad on his birthday 💝

#dad #birthdayboy #celebrate #family #august #august27 #2021 #picoftheday #project365 #day239

Day 239 2022

A honey bee snacking on a sea purslane bloom

#honeybee #seapurslane #sesuviumportulacastrum #beach #nature #overlays #art #august #august27 #2022 #picoftheday #project365 #day239

Day 239 2023

This has been a crazy month so far. I had no idea this was how it would turn out. I had envisioned something abstract but the sea is in my veins so what do you expect?! 😂These are the supplies I used to build it. The errors in the trial part are not pictured 😅Don’t worry, I still have a surprise for the next few days!

#create #doodle #art #surprise #fish #watercolor #paint #gelpen #glitter #august #august27 #2023 #picoftheday #project365 #day239

Day 240 2024

The endless pile of laundry I don’t want to fold.

#foldit #dailytheme #laundry #idontwanna #neverending #august #august27 #2024 #picoftheday #project365 #day240

[eunoiareview]

Give Me

give me black mangoes and the mahlab seeds of St. Lucie cherries, hibiscus and wavyleaf sea lavender, black papayas and crocus flower red saffron, black banana pulp and fennel pollen; mwen vle bo w kounye a, give me deep sandalwood kisses; rock purslane and ozark sundrops are in your hair; vibrant purple sugarbowl clematis and yellow jewelweeds fill up my eyes. you are the sweetest ‘i’. give me…

[catgirlcaliphate]

Part of that larger pattern of erasing Palestinian culture, specifically around food, involves Israel banning Palestinians from foraging for wild-growing herbs and altering the ecosystem such that traditional food plants like purslane don't grow as well.

Not to mention the wanton destruction of olive trees, preventing Gazans from accessing the sea for fishing, and building walls through the West Bank that prevent farmers from tending their land.

So yeah, the topic of food and labelling certain traditional foods "Israeli" is incredibly fraught. Food is political and that context cannot be ignored.

I do want to say re:food appropriation, for Palestinians it is a very very very sensitive issue. I don't know a single Palestinian who doesn't react vehemently to calling food "Israeli." One, because you have to recognize that this is within a larger pattern of completely erasing Palestinian identity, and two, because food is an essential core part of culture, where historical, familial instruction should be acknowledged.

I find it incredibly.... insulting to say "well food can be exchanged between cultures and people, so what's the big idea?" and neglect the fact that even within the Levant, there is a diverse array of cooking styles. To call certain dishes "Israeli" especially within the context of how the state of Israel was established, plays into the erasure of Palestinians.

It's often necessary to attribute the food we eat to specific cultures. For example, I, a Palestinian, would never claim ownership over Macarona Bil-Bashamil, or Yalenji, because they're "Arab." That's just not how food culture works. Different cultures, different climates, different environments all contribute to the food we eat and the clothes we wear. Food in itself is political because of how heavily it is tied to a location in which things are grown and raised.

Food is what builds community. Women, young and old, pass this knowledge throughout generations. And ESPECIALLY between peasant families that grow and raise the very flora and fauna we rely on in our dishes. This is a professional sort of knowledge that we celebrate and consider incredibly important. To strip our very food of our identity is not only insulting, but negates the centuries worth of food culture we've established in favor of homogenization. So yes, it IS possible to appropriate food, especially when you do not acknowledge the centuries worth of knowledge shared.

[foodies-channel]

🍥 Lobster oil poached halibut, confit Charlotte potatoes, mussel and dill beurre blanc, sea leeks, wakame and sea purslane

🍔YouTube || 🍟Reddit