Favourite Website 2019
Jan. 3rd, 2020 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
corviThis is zhelana 's December year in review meme.
December 21 → your favorite websites this year
My favourite website this year was iNaturalist, a natural history social network, which I joined January 12. You post photos of plants, animals, or fungi you see, along with the location and date you saw them (there are phone apps and upload tools to make this easy). You can look at other people's posts and help identify the species. You can follow specific people, species, or places and see all relevant creatures. You can create or join communities for various purposes.
A cool non-fungi observation of mine from each month in 2019:
January: Hyalophora euryalus
This is a giant silkmoth cocoon. It failed to hatch, but if it had, the resulting moth would be 15 cm across! People sometimes make a rough grey wild silk from these cocoons.
I haven't found an adult yet, but here's mothman52's photo. They're goth: red and black with stripes and crescent moon markings:
February: Lontra canadensis
A river otter glaring across the sea like a cranky old man.
April: Erythronium revolutum x erythronium oregonum
Probably the most interesting thing I found all year, from a taxonomic persepctive! A pink and white hybrid between the all-pink Erthronium revolutum and the all-white Erythronium oregonum. The hybrid had been discussed in scientific literature, but I got to be the first person to post one on iNaturalist, and identifying it required emailing photos to a lily taxonomist to figure out what the heck it was.
May: Leporidae
Baby rabbit hiding in a log.
June: Rosa Rugosa
A beach near my work has been completely overrun by invasive salt-roses. It grows right out of the sand, down to the waterline! There are petals floating on the waves, like something out of fairlyland. How the heck do they get any nutrients?
July: Aequoria Victoria
Glow in the dark jellyfish! Now I just have to see one at night.
August: Molothrus ater
Saw this juvenile cowbird traveling with a family of sparrows. Hadn't ever seen a cowbird before. The parents lay their eggs in the nests of other species, and the other species raise cowbirds as their own children.
Cowbirds have a special hardwired "password call". When a young cowbird hears the password call, it leaves the only family it has known and joins a cowbird flock with strange birds of a type it has never seen before, and starts singing the password song itself. If the young cowbird doesn't hear the password call before it reaches adulthood, it thinks forever it is a sparrow (or whatever) - it tries to mate with sparrows, it nests with sparrows, it travels in sparrow flocks the rest of its life.
I really want some author to write a story, in the form of a correspondence between two cowbirds, one of whom has heard the password call and one of whom has not, about identity and self and destiny, so I can read it.
October: Pseudacris regilla
Chorus frog! I like them much better when they're not sneaking into the house and climbing up the walls with their little sticky feet and keeping us up with their singing all night.
November: Phalacrocorax pelagicus
Came across a bunch of sleepy, grumbling cormorants a little before sunrise. They sounded like squeak doors. Cormorants are awesome andhilarious because they are diving birds that don't have waterproof feathers, so they must flail mightily to get into the air after diving, and they spend a lot of time standing about with their wings open trying to dry off.
December: Marmara arbutiella
This is a leafminer, a tiny insect that digs tunnels inside a leaf without breaking through the top or bottom surface of the leaf, to stay safe inside the leaf from predators. I have loved finding them since I was a kid. They look like writing, like maybe the forest is writing its own story on the leaves.
(If you have an iNaturalist account, please let me know!)
zhelana 's December year in review meme. December 21 → your favorite websites this year
My favourite website this year was iNaturalist, a natural history social network, which I joined January 12. You post photos of plants, animals, or fungi you see, along with the location and date you saw them (there are phone apps and upload tools to make this easy). You can look at other people's posts and help identify the species. You can follow specific people, species, or places and see all relevant creatures. You can create or join communities for various purposes.
A cool non-fungi observation of mine from each month in 2019:
January: Hyalophora euryalus
This is a giant silkmoth cocoon. It failed to hatch, but if it had, the resulting moth would be 15 cm across! People sometimes make a rough grey wild silk from these cocoons.
I haven't found an adult yet, but here's mothman52's photo. They're goth: red and black with stripes and crescent moon markings:
February: Lontra canadensis
A river otter glaring across the sea like a cranky old man.
April: Erythronium revolutum x erythronium oregonum
Probably the most interesting thing I found all year, from a taxonomic persepctive! A pink and white hybrid between the all-pink Erthronium revolutum and the all-white Erythronium oregonum. The hybrid had been discussed in scientific literature, but I got to be the first person to post one on iNaturalist, and identifying it required emailing photos to a lily taxonomist to figure out what the heck it was.
May: Leporidae
Baby rabbit hiding in a log.
June: Rosa Rugosa
A beach near my work has been completely overrun by invasive salt-roses. It grows right out of the sand, down to the waterline! There are petals floating on the waves, like something out of fairlyland. How the heck do they get any nutrients?
July: Aequoria Victoria
Glow in the dark jellyfish! Now I just have to see one at night.
August: Molothrus ater
Saw this juvenile cowbird traveling with a family of sparrows. Hadn't ever seen a cowbird before. The parents lay their eggs in the nests of other species, and the other species raise cowbirds as their own children.
Cowbirds have a special hardwired "password call". When a young cowbird hears the password call, it leaves the only family it has known and joins a cowbird flock with strange birds of a type it has never seen before, and starts singing the password song itself. If the young cowbird doesn't hear the password call before it reaches adulthood, it thinks forever it is a sparrow (or whatever) - it tries to mate with sparrows, it nests with sparrows, it travels in sparrow flocks the rest of its life.
I really want some author to write a story, in the form of a correspondence between two cowbirds, one of whom has heard the password call and one of whom has not, about identity and self and destiny, so I can read it.
October: Pseudacris regilla
Chorus frog! I like them much better when they're not sneaking into the house and climbing up the walls with their little sticky feet and keeping us up with their singing all night.
November: Phalacrocorax pelagicus
Came across a bunch of sleepy, grumbling cormorants a little before sunrise. They sounded like squeak doors. Cormorants are awesome andhilarious because they are diving birds that don't have waterproof feathers, so they must flail mightily to get into the air after diving, and they spend a lot of time standing about with their wings open trying to dry off.
December: Marmara arbutiella
This is a leafminer, a tiny insect that digs tunnels inside a leaf without breaking through the top or bottom surface of the leaf, to stay safe inside the leaf from predators. I have loved finding them since I was a kid. They look like writing, like maybe the forest is writing its own story on the leaves.
(If you have an iNaturalist account, please let me know!)
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Date: 2020-01-22 04:21 am (UTC)