“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
An actual World Heritage Post
how does this post not have a million notes but anyone online can quote it
I’ve seen a few ~aesthetic~ photos of rock stacks in rivers recently and this is just a reminder that you are destroying habitat when you move rocks around in rivers and streams.
In addition to dragonfly nymphs, rocky river beds are home to lots of other larval invertebrates like damselflies, mayflies, water beetles, caddisflies, stoneflies, and a bunch of dipterans. Not to mention lots of fish and amphibians!
Plus large scale rock stacking can change the flow of a stream and lead to increased erosion.
Everything is something’s habitat. You might as well not go outside for fear of stepping on some larval beetle.
This is hugely missing the point. The idea is to enjoy what’s left of our natural spaces while having as little an impact as possible. It’s not difficult to avoid intentionally destroying habitat. I recommend looking into the Leave No Trace principle which is very important for conservation. Cynicism doesn’t help anything.
A few rock stacks here and there wouldn’t have much of an impact alone. But in parks that see thousands or even millions of visitors each year, when you have people like you saying, “sure, literal scientists and park rangers are telling me not to do this, but surely that doesn’t apply to ME,” the effect is huge. Please attempt to see the bigger picture. You are not so special that YOU get to ignore the rules and continue intentionally destroying habitat even after you’ve been told it’s harmful.
Benthic invertebrates in streams are a CRITICAL part of a lot of food webs — because they are so diverse, they have a lot of feeding strategies that move calories up the food web and nutrients into the ecosystem around them. Some consume oil-rich diatom films, a critical source of essential fatty acids throughout the food web, some shred leaves and twigs into tiny bits that decompose more easily, allowing streams to remain clear and flowing, some filter out particulates from the water making it clearer, some are predators, concentrating nutrients — and they do this as larvae, and then the adults fly out of the stream, bringing the nutrients and calories from the stream to the surrounding landscape. The whole ecosystem is richer because of the diversity of benthic macroinvertebrates — which is why it’s important to preserve their habitat, though this is more “maintain dissolved oxygen levels by protecting temperature and limiting sedimentation” and “have a mixture of shaded and unshaded stream reaches” day to day. I do think “Don’t destroy the physical habitat for art projects” is an easy action to take but like. It’s fine to do that OUT of the creek? Build the stacks of rocks on ridge tops, where they aren’t habitat for stressed critical species? (caveat: I am in western North America and I have limited understanding of other parts of the world.)
A good addition that goes into more detail about WHY these critters are important to their particular ecosystems that I didn’t bother with on the original post because I didn’t think it would get so much traction.
But I’d say don’t stack rocks anywhere in parks. If you want to stack rocks on your private property, go nuts.
the most “cocomelon shit” i’ve ever experienced in my life was the time i was in calculus II and some girl in front of me was googling “assorted animals” and scrolling through pictures of clipart pigs and horses and shit on her laptop completely focused like it was her tax form
my brother started calling our cat “doobie brother” which he then lengthened to “dubious brother” and has since morphed into “brother dubious” like he’s some sort of fucked up little monk
brother dubious
“My liege, I’m afraid I have reason to believe your concubine plots against you. Worry not, your eminence, you can still trust me, of course…”
