Morning Ed: Wildlife {2018.04.23.M}
[Wl1] This is impressive and all, but when it comes to Australia I think it needs teeth or claws or something to stand out.
[Wl2] Let us have a moment of prayer or silent reflection, as my political mascot is extinct.
[Wl3] Death to pandas! (On a sidenote, if we can clone Barbra Streisand’s dogs, can we not clone pandas? White rhinos? Whales?)
[Wl4] The best way to keep animals from going extinct may be to eat them. Or just give them robotic guardians.
[Wl5] They’re not even trying to hide their planned invasion. They’ve already drawn first blood, it seems to me, in the Pacific theater, as they recruit allies.
[Wl6] Parasites!
[Wl7] A stork love story.
[Wl8] William Gearty has a theory on how whales ended up so big. And, somewhat relatedly: What the sea did to humans.
[Wl9] Ooooh, an octopus nursery!
[Wl0]
A domesticated cow escaped from her farm and spent the winter with a herd of wild bison in Poland's Bia?owie?a Forest.
She 'chose freedom', says a local scientist https://t.co/KXu90vZC7S
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) January 24, 2018
WI3: the article IS kind of stupid, but yeah, the “charismatic megavertebrates” get all the press, when the little things like soil invertebrates are probably what’s keeping life on this planet going. But little non-furry things are a hard sell to most people; I remember all the sneering over protecting snail darters, and they’re even vertebrates.
(Disclaimer: soil invertebrates are one of my research foci.)Report
Maybe if they had a little backbone, people wouldn’t walk all over them!Report
Except earthworms, most people get why earthworms are important.Report
Indeed Spice is life so we must revere the worms. At least that is what i remember from high school biology.Report
I don’t know if it’s ‘life’ as such, but if you want to get anywhere in this universe, the spice must flow.Report
They’re for fishing, right?
(Just kidding, everyone knows the only type of fishing allowed is catch-and-release fly fishing for artisanal Steelhead.)Report
Ironically, the “typical” earthworm people think of (Lumbricius terrestris) is not native to the US and is actually kind of problematic in some northern forests, because it eats up the leaf litter faster than it would have turned over with the smaller native worms.Report
“If we can clone Barbra Streisand’s dogs”
Not sure if that was kinda tongue in cheek, but we understand dogs WAYYYYY better than we understand whales, or pandas, or etc. Genetically as well as in other ways. Experimenting with dog breeding goes back 100s of years.Report