flowers blooming in such heft and numbers they bend the plant over and plants bearing fruit so hard they shower everything under it in fruits or make the very branches bend…. creatures are just experiencing vast bounty and good fortune out there fr fr

We've been trying to reach you about reporting your 2024 crop acres

1

We've been trying to reach you about reporting your 2024 crop acres

1

feeling strangely compelled to report acres to my local FSA office recently ngl

feeling strangely compelled to report acres to my local FSA office recently ngl

(to the self checkout attendant) like I’m not saying that trees should be ALLOWED to eat power lines, like obviously there is a mutually assured destruction between them kept at bay by man. all I’m saying is that I think it’s kind of funny when they start nibbling a little bit. like you drive past them and they’re obviously having a little taste up there? you know?

you quit your old job before confirming the new one? 😬

bro what does 'confirming' mean here lmao they formally offered, i formally accepted, they sent me the w4s and some paperwork to fill out?? i filled them out and sent them back?? i have to give my job 2 weeks notice before leaving, i set the date to leave and told them the date i could start, they said it would work and put me in communications with a supervisor who asked me my uniform size, the next step was efile???

well fellows I quit my job of multiple years to take this one job and then that job said Nevermind actually. so if anybody has plant lab job leads or outdoor plant job leads or interesting job leads hmu… I have knowledge of seeds and other things as well. and I can do manual labor

when I was in college in botany classes we talked about ‘cheap’ vs ‘expensive’ leaves and how some leaves are grown to be shed at the end of the fall and some leaves have a lot more resources invested and are meant to last years and then I think about the Doohicky of leaves, the Asian pitcher plant carnivorous leaves that have all the bells and whistles…..the shit has glands secreting digestive enzymes in the bottom and slippery teeth on the top and wax crystals lining the inside so insects can’t climb out….fangs on the top lid and hairs on the outside and mottled special colorization….some of them are woody or otherwise reinforced and take years to make… local guy in rural sumatra forced to make elaborate luxury saw traps by hand every single day of his life, it is the only way he can live,

ok INCREDIBLY old content originally meant for this blog but in 2018 when i was just a wee lad with a little spinner propeller hat and big rainbow lollipop i went to a carnivorous plant convention in california and met a bunch of people who breed/collect/study these guys. one person was this collector who was slowly working on leaving the hobby or at least no longer growing plants, and he had a bunch of carnivorous plant related files he was charging like 50 cents for or something, and so i came into possession of these, which are examples of the kind of paperwork you have to have done to legally ship/trade endangered species of both plants and animals. functionally very boring paperwork, but something i found like, incredibly fascinating. i blacked out the personal id of the person and then immediately forgot to ever upload them, lmao.

these plants were bred and raised in a greenhouse and sold abroad, not taken from the wild, but because the species are endangered and often protected in their native countries (most of these are nepenthes, asian pitcher plants, a huge family spread throughout oceania and southeast asia), there's a lot more documentation that needs to be done regardless of their origin, both on the end of the seller and on the end of the buyer.

the rabbit hole on carnivorous plant trade is deep and kind of wild. there's plenty of common, non-threatened, greenhouse-grown pitcher plants on the market that people buy all the time, even non-collectors, but there's a whole debate to be had on if it's morally okay to be collecting the more endangered/rare of these plants in the first place. the big argument for breeding is that breeding them in captivity means there's more supply that's not poached from the wild, meaning poachers have less of an incentive to take the risk of taking adult plants from their habitats; from what i've heard, sometimes countries will issue permits for breeders to collect some wild seeds just to create a non-wild breeding pool to drive down the price. predictably, however, you also get people who are very much willing to pay a lot of money to get as rare of a plant as possible.

anyone familiar with the allure valuable plants have had over people throughout history can imagine the rest, but here's an article about a guy who started buying poached plants to enrich his private nepenthes collection, who then got busted by a fish and wildlife service agent embedded in his carvirorous plant circle. the plants this guy was buying were being sold to him without any CITES paperwork or declarations like the ones above; it was literally just a guy in indonesia taking rare plants from the woods around where he lived, selling them over facebook marketplace and ebay, and mailing them overseas as an undeclared 'gift' to get around customs. frighteningly small steps to take on all sides, to be honest.

(also, fun fact: another example of carnivorous plants that get poached are wild venus fly traps, which are only native to north and south carolina in the US. from what i understand it's a mix of people who genuinely did not know it's a native species and people who really are just going out into the woods and digging up plants to sell online. sometimes poaching is closer to home than you'd think!)

anyway. wild and interesting times in the land of plants recovered from a hard drive lmao

the high highs of finding out about a type of vague filter-feeding living pond scum commonly called 'moss animals'. the low lows of learning they are not moss

bees do stuff with their little feet on flowers like it’s the most important thing they’ve ever done like they’re on a mission zoned in on the teeniest flower you’ve ever seen like by god there’s No time to waste we have to pollinate this luscious urban meadow with sparse weedy outer reaches mowed by a guy on a bush hog by 6 pm sharp

vittaria appalachiana should be on stamps (one of america’s natural wonders) and the post office should give them. to Me

thinking about this again bc i am a little tipsy.....the strategy of looking like other creatures to avoid being eaten is classic strat in all kingdoms of life but once we get past the 'how' question and sort out the academically debatable findings in that one paper about them allegedly mimicking plastic plants as well-- just sweeping all those unconfirmed but distressing possible implications under the rug for a second-- why do this? custom tailoring your life to the leaves next to you is pretty cool but theres a reason no other plant does it, and that's because the path of least resistance in an evolutionary sense seems like it's easier to just pick one organism to mimic really well instead of picking many common leaf shapes to mimic really poorly.... many things to consider

when I think about boquila trifolioata I feel like a medieval peasant in the dark ages simply having to accept the world as it is and that’s just not an experience you get much these days. like yes it is a vining plant that mimics the leaves of the plants it grows on. no we don’t know how

this isn't your mainblog?

it is now!

Did ypu delete your main?

i did! in fact, this blog is the last blog i have remaining on this great webbed site tungle dot edu, and i moved it to another account following only like 3 people, so i only can use it to post original plantposts. I have an exported copy of all my blogs on a hard drive, but other than that they all have been nuked from orbit. i think i only ever posted my main like once on here, but if youre one of the few followers of this blog who knew what it was, thats the explanation lmao.

there are several major reasons i did it, but a pertinent one is because i am entering a gametophyte stage. i'm switching jobs too! still working with plants, but i won't be in the lab anymore starting two weeks from this past friday. i'm sure i'll end up posting about it.

it’s so funny too because like, not to cyberbully them or anything but the mimics aren’t even that good because they don’t need to be. they just have to be vaguely the same size and shape as the leaves around them at any given time. like they’re not going for photorealistic detail or anything here, they’re just looking to seem less tasty or at worst just as tasty as the existing unmunched leaf next to them, while also managing to outsource the risk of having lots of exposed munchable leaves visibly out in the open to whichever plant it’s growing on. and I think that says a lot about society if society was plants in temperate forests in Chile and Argentina

when I think about boquila trifolioata I feel like a medieval peasant in the dark ages simply having to accept the world as it is and that’s just not an experience you get much these days. like yes it is a vining plant that mimics the leaves of the plants it grows on. no we don’t know how