How’s that? Here botany is taught through one middle school year, plus start classes about environment and general nature in elementary school.
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I am coming to this rather late. Here are three widespread misundertsandings that have impacts.
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That any habitat will be improved by planting trees on it. In Britain and maybe more widely, tree-planting is so ingrained as the thing to do to help the environment, and it does so much damage to species-rich grasslands, wetlands, heaths, etc. It isn’t even the best way to get more trees. If you leave land to natural succession you get a far more interesting habitat than the dense even-aged plantations the tree-planters go for.
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There is an ideal pond that all other ponds should aspire to. Again, this won’t apply everywhere, but in Britain if you look in a book about freshwater life, it will show you a pond diagram with reeds and bulrushes around the edges, then a submerged plant zone with dragonfly larvae and deeper water with fish and ducks. Nothing wrong with that (except maybe leave out the fish and ducks). But it isn’t how all ponds should be. I’m particularly interested in seasonal ponds that dry out each summer and all the ways invertebrates cope with / exploit that situation. So often, such ponds are dug out so they hold more water, maybe with the extra indignity of a butyl liner. Or they are seen as muddy nuisances and get filled in. And probably then planted with trees.
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Biodiversity is treated as a homogeneous substance that can be added and removed like money in a bank account, and the aim is to pack in as much as possible. So, property developer destroys ancient heathland, but that doesn’t matter because he sets aside half a hectare and sows it with pseudo-wildlfowers - more species and prettier than before so he claims the development has been a gain for wildlife.
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im in the us, it might vary by region but where I went to school we didn’t have specialized botany classes before the college level. in high school bio we did nothing about plants except for photosynthesis. in college gen bio 2 (2nd semester of gen bio) we had a few more plant-based lectures, including plant diversity and reproduction. the parts of the flower (stamen, pistil, etc) were covered here. it was all very basic, if you wanted more detail into botany you would take the actual botany courses, which pretty much only the plant majors took
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Not late at all, my friend!
Nor is anyone else with anything else they would like to contribute. This is a quite fascinating and enlightening discussion.
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Old-growth tallgrass prairies!
It’s been fascinating for me to learn that prairies are as intricate, diverse, and ecologically important as forests and other more well-known ecosystems, can take centuries to fully develop, and are increasingly rare. Here in the US Midwest, I really wish more of my neighbors understood:
- How little remnant prairie still exists, and what a valuable thing we’ve lost by turning most of it into farmland
- Around 75% of the plant biomass in a prairie is hidden underground
- How much time and work prairie restoration takes
- That abandoned lot down the street full of invasives is not a prairie
- The idea of “wild” or “natural” areas is not synonymous with trees. Similar to how a handful of charismatic animal species tend to get most of the attention to the detriment of others, grasslands in general are really underappreciated!
Disclaimer: this isn’t my area of expertise, just an area of casual interest. For anyone with more knowledge on the topic, please chime in with more things you’d like the public to know about prairies!
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Some even hate some aspects of these groups (moths, ladybug larvae) but love the rest (butterflies, adult ladybugs).
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Here’s another juicy one: “wildlife gardens/parks” are suboptimal for conserving many flightless insects and other low-dispersal taxa because people often forget about habitat connectivity.
There’s no way Nyctoporis carinata’s going to recolonize that patch of native vegetation before its squishy guts are extruded by five cars in a row. Even if the leaves are extra delicious.
(Before you ask: yes yes I know about stuff like salmon ladders and their non-aquatic equivalents, but I still think we haven’t built enough of them and that the ones which do exist are not always high-quality.)
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love that, yup, exactly
While this is very noble of you, its unfortunately an ideological luxury wholly unaffordable for most communities living on the coast or inland lakes who depend on fish as a major constituent of their diet
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But subsistence fishermen battle against foreign trawlers. Who are feeding ‘very noble’ who live in faraway cities, and don’t all realise the impact of eating fish. All that discarded bycatch, which city dwellers won’t eat. Birds and turtles and …
If you care about marine life (and have other choices) don’t eat it. I’m vegetarian.
In West Africa scientists and fishers are cooperating to record species on iNat.
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Agreed Diana
What I was just trying to point out is the paradox of placing such value in fish to not eat and cause them pain, whilst many of the worlds poorest along our coastlines are not able to consider this as an option
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I think plant diversity is a big issue with these too, often the plant taxa used might not be DIRECTLY native to the area (lots of midwest prairie taxa getting used out east etc), but still utilized by generalist pollinators. Milkweeds are great and support a lot besides monarchs, but I wish it was easier to get people to pay attention to native plants found immediately in their area, theres so many weird plants out there that could help support remnant populations of specialist bugs
I’ve actually been working on trying to do something like this on my campus, help bulk up native plantings with more, forgettable I guess plants that were present in the area more widely in the past before development and deer overgrazing knocked em out. Won’t help flightless bugs as much but hopefully it’ll throw a bunch of moths and chrysomelids and weevils a bone
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Fish is a inexpensive food for the poorest, it’s not like actual nobles eat most of it. But anyway whethear you eat it or not, it won’t change anything, they won’t stop using trawlers because a bunch of vegetarians say they won’t eat that.
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Arborist here:
- We really do not know a lot at all about trees. They’re very alien species compared to everything else we know about plants and animals. We have some pretty good ideas now about tree biology, but there’s still a lot of unanswered questions and a constant revisions on things we thought we knew a decade ago. I get so frustrated talking to people whose heart is in the right place about trees (often non-profits or other volunteer groups) and they try to make very bold claims about certain things like tree health when no professional arborists would stake their livelihood on a claim like that.
- Mushrooms on a tree does not mean the tree is a case for immediate removal
- Tree roots are not water-seeking missiles out to destroy your foundation or sewer lines. If you have a tree cracking your foundation/underground lines there was almost definitely a leak in those systems already, which is how the root found its way over there in the first place. A tree near a home doesn’t need to be removed just because it happens to be close to a home
- Roots can spread out 2x - 3x past the canopy and are just as important to the tree’s health as the branches and leaves. Give them space to grow. If you plant trees in little raised planting beds surrounded by concrete/rocks, don’t be surprised when every tree you put in there seems to mysteriously die after a decade. If you’re paving a new driveway or doing major landscaping, don’t drive machinery close to the trunk (causes soil compaction, which suffocates roots and can lead to the death of the tree) or cut every root in your way (ruins the tree’s ability to breathe, drink, get nutrients and maybe even stand upright in the next storm).
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When we moved into our house 20+ years ago, one of my first tasks was to take a sledgehammer to the concrete that surrounded an ash tree in our backyard and was threatening to eventually kill it. The tree is still alive, has grown, and provides great shade in summer.
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Indeed!
I’m doing the same myself, can’t wait to spray my yard (and a whole bunch of unsuspecting parks) with Lastarriaea and Navarretia seeds.
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don’t tell say that to anyone like Silvia Earle, advocating for massive moratoriums on fishing 
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I’m worried about a huge tulip poplar by our house for reason 4. It had lot of equipment driven near it - but at least on only “1 of 4” sides. Crossing fingers. Surely it’s so huge the root system is large / deep at this point…
Seagulls, overall. They’re such fascinating birds, but most people in my country think of them as a plague (maybe people think like that wherever seagulls exist).
Out of all the 11 species that regularly occur in Portugal (yes, 11, they’re not all the same as most my fellow countrymen think), only 2 are usually seen in urban centers, and of those 2, only one reproduces in our cities (causing some trouble).
Besides those 11, there are records of another 11 species in mainland Portugal. These species are considered rarities, only appearing from time to time.
So 22 different species. This is, by itself, fascinating. Apart from that, identifying seagulls is a challenge, but I understand that only a handfull of lunatic like me are interested by that.
So, what could the general public find interesting about this group? Well, the amount of species could be something cool to know. Their overall good adaptation to human presence. The way they learn how to survive in urban environments, sort of like corvids. Their migration patterns (in winter, Portugal receives a lot of seagulls from Britain, Central and Northern Europe). The young seagulls make the journey south when they’re only one or two months old.
Well, I could be rambling about seagulls (or other topics of interest) for ages. But I think the point is made
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