Maz ✧ @hadesplease

Skylar rae cherries are literally just rainier cherries and you cannot convince me otherwise

@soiled_plants3 absolutely horrendous 😭

This is not talked about enough and it’s an unfortunately incredibly predatory industry. It cost me $850 to get my dad’s ashes back for a basic cremation. They handed me him in a cardboard box & then tried to upsell me a $200 urn with the American flag on it while I was in tears.

@ jules || in the tower @lonelyisthejulz

2 days ago

what do u mean it costs money to die

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found a stag beetle all tangled up in a spider web right outside my door, turned around and there was another one behind me. so cool.

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@soiled_plants3 how in the fuck

@soiled_plants2 I am so sorry 😔

there's a family of really beautiful milk snakes living in my rock bed out back and I got sooooo excited when I caught a glimpse of one

Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature

5 days ago

You don't have to love snakes, but you should probably stop treating them like villains. Most snakes are not medically dangerous to humans. And even the venomous ones aren't out there looking for a fight. A snake in your yard is usually doing one of three things: trying to hide,

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There is an animal that eats anthrax, botulism, cholera, and rabies for lunch and walks away fine. It doesn't have a good PR team, so most people have no idea what it's actually doing for us. The turkey vulture's stomach acid runs at a pH of around 1, roughly as corrosive as battery acid, and hot enough to dissolve bones, hide, and virtually any pathogen that comes with the carcass. A vulture eating a diseased animal isn't spreading the disease, but putting an ending to it. The infection chain terminates in the vulture's gut and goes nowhere else. Few other scavengers on Earth does this reliably. Without vultures, things get bad for humans in a hurry. We've learned this hard lesson first hand. In the 1990s, Indian farmers started giving their cattle a cheap painkiller called diclofenac. When vultures ate the carcasses, the drug destroyed their kidneys. The population collapsed by more than 95 percent in under a decade, one of the fastest declines of any bird species ever recorded. The carcasses didn't disappear. Feral dogs and rats moved in to do the cleanup instead. Both species actually carry and spread rabies. Both brought the disease into contact with human populations in ways vultures never would have. A 2024 study in the American Economic Review estimated the vulture collapse contributed to roughly 500,000 additional human deaths over the following decade. Not metaphorically. Counted deaths, linked statistically to the collapse of one bird. The same thing is now beginning in sub-Saharan Africa, where poachers bait carcasses with poison to kill lions and elephants that might alert rangers. Vultures find the carcass first, as they always do. Six of Africa's eleven vulture species are now threatened with extinction. The animal that shows up to the things nobody else will touch is doing more disease control than most of what we actively protect. It just has the misfortune of looking exactly like what it is.

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Most people who plant flowers for pollinators forget one thing: bees need water. Bees use water for more than drinking. They cool the hive with it. They feed it to larvae. Mason bees need it to make mud to seal their nest chambers. Some species make 80 water trips a day during nest-building. When safe water sources are scarce, bees often drink from pools, roadside puddles, or pesticide-contaminated runoff instead. The pollinator garden you built isn't complete until you give them somewhere safe to drink, and it's dead simple: 1. Grab a shallow dish. I use a terracotta pot basin but a bowl or even a plastic dish is fine. 2. Fill with stones, marbles, or pebbles so the bees have somewhere safe to land and drink. 3. Add water. Tap water is fine. It's okay if a leaf falls into the dish, bees are actually more attracted to slightly "dirty" water than they are perfectly clean water. That's it. Five minutes, a shallow dish, and a handful of rocks can turn a flower patch into a much better habitat for the pollinators you're trying to help.

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does anyone on here have any experience with removing eurasion milfoil from a pond

Tummy rub Tuesday

@soiled_plants3 you tried your best to save them, and there's nothing that can change the weight of their death on you because it's sad no matter what, but it's absolutely not your responsibility or your fault. you did everything you could for them.

The wasp you've been swatting at is hunting the invasive spider taking over the Southeast. The Joro spider arrived from East Asia around 2013, almost certainly on a shipping container, and has since spread across Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, and beyond. Populations have been doubling annually in some areas. Native orb-weaver spiders at the same sites have declined roughly 40 percent per year over the same period. It's not a small problem. The Joro itself won't hurt you. The fangs rarely break skin, the venom is mild, and the spider typically drops from its web rather than engages when disturbed. But here's where it gets interesting. When researchers needed to track how far the Joro had spread in its early years, they started opening mud dauber nests. Mud daubers hunt spiders, paralyze them, and seal them into mud cells as live food for their larvae. They were already collecting Joros, and they were finding them faster and more efficiently than any field team could manage. The mud daubers hunting Joros aren't going to turn the tide. But they found them before the scientists did, which tells you something about whose side the wasps are on. Let the nest stay.

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@soiled_plants3 I'm so sorry, it's not fair.

@soiled_plants3 hoping there is a hell solely so animal dumpers can get a special place in it

@soiled_plants3 and you're allowed to be selfish and self centered sometimes!!! you actually do so much and being overwhelmed with no help can be so fucking exhausting and frustrating

@soiled_plants3 too bad we aren't closer cause if we could get them to NY there are rescues here that totally could take them - plus my step mom is a rehabber so she has hella resources here 😭

@soiled_plants3 I'm sorrrry 😭 I wish I could help youuuuu and the babies

Before you pull that fat striped caterpillar off your dill, take a second look at it. The green-and-black banded caterpillar chewing your parsley, dill, or fennel is very likely a black swallowtail larva. The female laid a single egg on your herb plant after detecting the right chemistry, and that caterpillar is the result. Black swallowtails are common across much of North America, especially east of the Rockies, and they're one of the more striking backyard butterflies you’re likely to see. Deep black wings marked with yellow, orange, and blue along the edges. If you've seen one visiting your flowers, this is where it started. The caterpillar will eat a fair amount before it's done. If you only have one plant and want to protect it, you can always grow an extra and move the caterpillar over. Dill and its relatives self-seed easily, so there's usually more on the way anyway. Or just leave it. You planted the herbs. The butterfly found them. That's the system working exactly as it should.

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@jonaircon that looks fireeeeeee