Tungsten also has a much higher melting point. My grandfather used to make his own weights by melting down lead ingots with a benchtop furnace and pouring it into moulds. I presume that’s a pretty common practice among fishermen. You couldn’t do that with tungsten. It would need a much better furnace and would require a lot more energy to get to the required temperature.
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This is the funniest one I’ve heard in a while. Going to quote it!
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Wow, that’s too far! I know people usually can’t tell lichen from moss, but I expect everyone who was in a forest to grasp that Polytrichum is different from the moss that grows on their stone house (sure, the one that grows there is like 10 species)
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People also think that snails can come out of their shells, which is as impossible as you or I going for a walk but leaving our skull behind.
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Pffft I do that all the time! …wait, I mean “brain”…
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I’ve had to argue against just about all of these back when I helped with herp identification on a local facebook id group. Snakes in particular really have the short end of the string with so many uninformed people and it’s terrible how mainstream some of these fallacies have become. Eventually it got to the point where there were so many people posting photos of dead snakes they had killed just to harass the ID helpers that a lot of the original group members left. You’d also get people writing angry essays about how anyone who is interested in snakes is apparently 1.) a freak, 2.) mentally ill for liking such a creature, or 3.) a satan worshipper.
For the sake of my mental health I left facebook completely but it was a scary eye opener of just how cruel people can be and how some absolutely refuse being open to learning about what’s around us.
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Oh wow, I didn’t know tegus can be partially warm blooded! A lot of people don’t know there are warm-blooded fish too - the Great White Shark, Opah and several tuna species are all partially warm-blooded (their head runs a little warmer than the rest of their body), which gives them an edge over their cold-blooded prey in cold water.
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I’m sorry to hear that! I’m glad I starting IDing on iNat and not Facebook.
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That honey bees are an invasive species and outcompeting native bees, of which there are several 1000 distinct species (in the US) but many almost extinct.
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That’s really cool!
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Birds and as it’s thought now non-bird dinos and likely their ancestors are/were warm-blooded too. So it’s a good question what % of reptiles are cold-blooded.
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Ecology and biodiversity conservation:
How impacts in one thing radiate and affect other things, often times in a seemingly outsized way, and how small changes have a major effect.
Also the idea of thresholds, buffers, and tipping points. Just because whatever you’ve been doing doesn’t have obvious changes right now doesn’t mean that you can keep doing said thing. You can hit a wall with a sledgehammer and it’ll stay up, but if you keep doing you’ll pass a threshold, and it’ll fall.
How much of our biodiversity and natural areas have been lost already, and how long that’s been happening for.
Feedback loops and run-away processes…
I can keep going with this, but you gut the idea.
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freshwater ecosystems are so shockingly diverse, and important to the health of pretty much every adjacent ecosystem out there terrestrial and marine, yet they often play second fiddle to terrestrial and marine systems in terms of the conservation attention they get, and sometimes it feels like people could just care less unless theres an economically important game fish involved (which are, half the time, stocked and invasive lol)
Its downright incredible to think about how 51% or so of all described fish species are freshwater taxa (and that number will only get BIGGER with time, theres so many undescribed fish out there), despite only a little bit over 1 or 2% of the planet’s water being the waters all these fish are found in
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Ha ha! I think we all do that from time to time.
I too have that dream of buying a large piece of land and turning into wildlife habitat. It’s so sad to see the constant development and ripping out of open space for more concrete and lawns.
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On the topic of bees…most people I run into when out photographing bees are totally unaware that there are bees other than western honey bees here in the US. When I mention that there are thousands of native bees, they seem surprised and I’ve had a couple people ask me where are their hives.
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Because it’s not something covered in the (American) public education system, until maybe a college level entomology class. Honey and bumble bees get media coverage/portrayal in film.
Anyone here that’s curious: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QVaJNV1qSFI&feature=youtu.be
It’s a worldwide issue - something on the order of 20,000 bee species, 500,000 parasitic wasps (estimated and mostly undescribed), and 300,000+ beetles. Diversity is something you have to seek out and learn about. I’d argue it’s getting worse with first world kids growing up on screens, not outdoors.
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Agreed with the other comments re: pollinators. Additionally, I do wish people would ask entomologists/pollinator ecologists something besides ‘how do I get rid of carpenter bees’ and ‘how do I stop yellowjackets from trying to eat my food’. As if we are here as pest control experts! I work to protect species, not give advice on how to get rid of them. Do they expect me to agree with public sentiment on which creatures ‘surely everyone’ hates and vindicate their misguided subjective beliefs?
There’s much I could lament as a pollinator ecologist, from the hypocrisy of the bee/wasp dichotomy to, as mentioned above, the ridiculousness of wanting butterflies but spraying for ‘pest’ caterpillars (and to take that a step further, wanting songbirds but thinking a bird feeder is all you need! It’s incredible that most people do not realize that the vast majority of songbirds rely on caterpillars, so unless you have a majority-native yard, you won’t be attracting breeding or migrant songbirds). Getting folks to stop trying to install honeybee hives everywhere to ‘save the bees’, realizing that most wasps are solitary and completely docile and that the social species are also docile so long as you’re not staring down their nest at close range… (and that, for god’s sake, they don’t have morality, they are not evil, they are not out to get you, what kind of delusions of grandeur must one have to think themselves so important to a tiny insect!)
As for ecology in general, yeah… just the lack of understanding of just how much biodiversity exists, particularly of invertebrates, that mammals are not the ‘default’ state of life and we shouldn’t be judging the value of other species by how similar they are to humans or puppies or what have you… the average animal is a beetle, yknow?? We are the unusual ones. I could go on, but. Yeah. There’s a lot.
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If more people knew what exceptionally good mothers spiders are, it might help to change how they are percieved by most people. There is not a single spider that does not perform at least basic brood care in creating a costly egg sac, which protects the eggs from weather, predators and parasitoids. But most spider mommys go even further and guard their eggs sacs (e.g.crab spiders) often until their own death, carry it around and into favourable micro-climates to ensure wellbeeing and early hatch of their young (e.g. pisaurids), carry their young for protection while starving themselfs during that period ( e.g. wolf spiders), even feeding their young either with hunted prey or via regurgutation feeding (e.g. many theridiid spiders) and in rare but most impressive cases even allow their offspring to eat them during a process called matriphagy to give them a jump start in life (e.g. amaurobid spiders). And in even rarer cases nit only mothers regurgitate and sacrifice their own body, but also aunts, that forfeit their own reproduction and instead die during caring for the brood of their sisters (my beloved social Stegodyphus spiders). You wont find this kind of extreme sacrifice in a lot of other animals…
Also, the question “is this spider venomous” is a bit silly, because almost all are (very few exceptions)… That is their strategy in hunting. It would be better to ask, if they could potentially be dangerous for humans. Spoiler:most are not! … and the ones that could be dangerous are usually not the large and flashy ones.
On the topic of warm blooded and cold blooded: these terms are actually anyways not correct anymore and no serious scientist in germany (i am not sure if it is still more common in englsih, as there are common correct term missing I think? ) would use them anymore. A “cold blooded” reptile by no means always has cold blood… it can spike quite a bit after having been exposed to the sun.
So it is better to use the terms “wechselwarm” (meaning “changing blood” or poikliotherm in clever) and the oposite “gleichwarm” (meaning "blood that stayes the same or homoiotherm) … There are exceptions obviously … as basically always in biology … but in general it makes mir sense
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Oh I can help you out with this, I can ask lots of questions about pollinators! (And I adore carpenter bees, they’re completely awesome)
Here’s one to start off: I’ve long admired the huge colonies of cellophane bees we get in the coastal sandstone bluffs here in Northern California - are there any ways I can make attractive nesting sites for them in a home garden setting?
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