#they have a bunch of endemic cave species!!

[strange-lamp-stranger]

i fell down a wikipedia rabbit hole and now it's one a.m. and i have to wake up at 8 this morning. so. there goes my hopes of productivity tomorrow i guess (i have so many things i need to do) (and i don't have the executive function skills to do them all) (ideally i should've finished 2-3x as much stuff as i actually have by now) (oops that turned into a bit of a vent) (i'm fine, none of this is world-shattering, life goes on even if i miss a few assignments. i will be kind to myself no matter what)

[raindropsonwhiskers]

Yeah!! I'm an ecology student and let me tell you, living in VA - especially Appalachian VA, where all the cool salamanders are - is the BEST. We've got a fun mix of Karst topography (essentially big chunks of porous limestone that erode pretty quickly to form cave systems, sinkholes, etc. They're probably where most of those endemic invertebrates live, since a lot of the cave systems host entirely unique ecosystems!) near the Blue Ridge up north/west, swamp in the south, and coastal/bay in the east that makes for some really diverse ecosystems

And we have four pretty distinct seasons, which means that we have a lot of vernal amphibians and invertebrates - species that rely on ephemeral wetlands which only occur in the spring to breed or raise their young. A lot of these species are salamanders, newts, cnidarians, and frogs :D I actually got to help my ecology prof survey one local patch of ephemeral wetland a year or two ago and it was a lot of fun to see all the little baby critters

The Chesapeake Bay area in particular is also super diverse, since it's pretty big as far as brackish bays go. Even setting aside stuff like the Chincoteague horses (my beloveds, got to see them in person last year after agessss of adolescent horse girl yearning), it hosts a ton of both migratory and stationary shorebirds, not to mention all the cool aquatic critters. You can find squid, sharks (small ones), all sorts of crabs (and other equally neat inverts), shrimp, weird algae... it's a total grab bag if you run a dredging net through it!

Even if you go a little further up the watershed, we've got native river otters, loads of ducks, grey herons, all sorts of cool fish, a bunch of different native trees (I personally love dogwoods best, but I'm biased), gorgeous native flowers, and just... so many other cool species. Opossums! Bald eagles! Skunks! Loads of native butterflies! Walnut trees that poison the ground to make it harder for other tree species to compete! Really dumb deer! Poison ivy and it's sneakier cousin, poison oak!

All of which is to say, congratulations, you activated a special interest so strong it became my major, and that's Virginia Has Cool Ecology. Please enjoy this free sample of my favorite facts.

I feel like there's gonna be a really obvious answer to this, but I've started wondering why so many Carolinian plants are named after Virginia (i.e. Virginia waterleaf, southern live oak/Quercus virginiana, Virginia mountain mint, etc). There's even a Wikipedia page dedicated to "shit that has virginana as a scientific name." Do they have more naturalists there? Is it just that it sounds like a better name than, like, ontarioensis?