Nat
Bugs and fungi photos.🐞🍄 I love bees! 🐝 Environmental science masters student. Doing art occasionally. I also enjoy electronics and tech. 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
- #bees queen red-tailed bumblebee (b.lapidarius) and common carder (b.pascuorum) 🐝
- 🐝 Today I was delighted to find what I thought was a broken-belted bumblebee (b.soroeensis). But no, upon closer inspection, the break is due to a loss of yellow hairs, not the addition of black ones, and the white tail band is missing. This is the Early bumblebee (b.pratorum). #bee #bees
- Earthstar, Geastrum fungus #fungi #fungifriends
- Seedling update! Mostly everything has geminated including corncockle, chicory, self-heal, chives, coreopsis, yarrow, cardamine, valerian and musk mallow... in that order. What hasn't germinated is violets, red-dead nettle, Canterbury bells aconitum and lungwart.
- Putting the bees out for the spring. These are Andrena Scotia. The hawthorn bee, and they should emerge late this month or next month. #bees
- Reposted by NatIt’s official, 2024 was the worst year for bumblebees since records began🚨 The latest findings from #BeeWalk, our national bumblebee monitoring scheme, have revealed bumblebee numbers declined by almost a quarter (22.5%) across Great Britain💔 Read on: www.bumblebeeconservation.org/british-bumb...
- #fungifriends birch polypores
- Such an adorable talk this was: Earwigs don't go back to earwig hotels because of the quality, but instead if an earwig is currently happy inside and releasing pheromones ie, "currently giving it a good review" others in range will visit it. 😂
- Some of my favourite moments from Lars's talk yesterday: Finding out that bees play and have emotional states. That they can imagine the shape of objects they have felt but not seen. Learning their brains are more fine, complex and specialized than human ones, so they are smart despite their size.
- Reposted by NatOur new paper, based on data from 1,705 studies, shows that pesticides are toxic to organisms they are not intended to harm, including fungi, microbes, plants, insects, & vertebrates such as ourselves. Questions the wisdom of applying over 3 million tonnes of them every year...
- A cluster of ladybirds is called a "loveliness", it's an old Suffolk term.
- Have started the seedlings off early for the year indoors. I am adding to the native plants with cuckoo flower, corncockle which was almost extinct in the UK in 2014, pulsatilla, red dead-nettle, soapwart, yarrow, chicory(?), pulmonaria or lungwart, and monkshood or aconitum napellus.
- There is a native variety of A.napellus in the UK, and there was an aconitum native to the UK found thousands of years ago in the paleo record in Brayshay & Dinnin, (1999). Though these do not seem to be exactly the same as the garden variety A.napellus though. sppaccounts.bsbi.org/content/acon...
- I've also added a garlic mustard Allaria.P, as I was at a Species on the Edge talk this week about the small blue butterfly, where I was recommended to plant it to support orange-tip butterflies. They also enjoy cuckoo flower so I hope I'll be able to feed some orange-tips this year.
- “The sun poured out light on flooded waters, on purple-side thickets of alder, and celandines under them….as if all was now to be well.” From E. Thomas, In Pursuit of Spring. www.edwardthomaspoetryplaces.com/post/celandine
- Reposted by NatIf you discover a hibernating bumblebee while digging in your garden or allotment this winter, try to avoid disturbing her, and loosely re-cover her so she can hit the snooze button until spring. More advice from @bumblebeetrust.bsky.social at www.bumblebeeconservation.org #SaveTheBees #nature 🐝
- Reposted by NatPet owners accidentally poisoning garden birds. Our latest research finds pet flea treatments (fipronil and imidacloprid) in 100% of blue tit and great tit nests, with nestling mortality higher in the more contaminated nest. @SongBirdSBS @SussexUni @CannelleTassin
- I did some sculpting and 3D printing and made a Blahaj shower thing using OnShape and Meshmixer. #blahaj #3Dprinting
- This was a fascinating talk, I learnt about how treehoppers use the protubances on their heads to use static electricity to detect predators, how insects visiting flowers use electrostatic charges to help them attract pollen, how ticks use electrostatic charges to passively attach to hosts...
- And many of them are free, like this one Electric Ecology: How Invertebrates Capitalise on Static Electricity, which sounds fascinating. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/electric-e...
- I'm excited to read some of Sam's papers on electroreception now onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
- Reposted by NatNew book: #Paleontology in Public - and it's 100% free to read! I contributed a chapter on the public history of #Spinosaurus, co-authored with @tattersdill.bsky.social, and also provided some Gertie-inspired cover art. Congrats to @chrismanias.bsky.social for getting this over the line!
- "Palaeontology in Public: Popular Science, Lost Creatures and Deep Time" is out today, and is freely downloadable as an open access pdf, published by @uclpress.bsky.social ! uclpress.co.uk/book/palaeon... 🎺🦕🦕🦕⚒️🎥🦖🦖🦖📖📰🦣🦣🦣🎺
- Reposted by NatOne might think that Nazi crimes and palaeontology never overlapped, and yet... Have you ever wondered what happened to tens of palaeontologists & geologists in the Nazi-occupied Poland? How academics helped to bring down the fascist regime. And a curious story of Schindler-equivalent in geology. 🧵
- Reposted by Natdinosaurs are so cool
