So disappointed. We found some old graves of dead Westads, and that’s about it.
Damn few spiders. I don’t know why. We were tromping around in nature preserves around Fertile, but spiders were scarce, we only found a handful. We didn’t even see many insects, other than ants, which were flourishing in the sandy soils of the old Lake Agassiz shoreline.
I was reduced to taking pictures of <shudder> flowers, out of a lack of worthy subjects.
All right, time for me to go home.
Maybe you should have taken up…botany instead. Plants develop too, right? Try that weed known as thale cress. It went from lowly weed to super model I hear.
And Seek say you found the invasive spotted knapweed.
is there a known trend in loss of arachnid species globally or locally?
Is a decline in the number of spiders present something you have noticed or learnt much about over the course your studies, PZ please?
I do know there’s talk about the “insect apocalypse” * and it would rather logically flow that the same is true for spiders as mainly insectivorous predators and similarly invertebrates.
Sorry if depressing folks.
.* See :
Source : https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/INSECT-APOCALYPSE/egpbykdxjvq/
Plus :
Source : https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023989118
As well as :
Source : https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/20/world/insect-collapse-climate-change-scn/index.html
@ 3. Reginald Selkirk :
..under baking sunlight with temperatures at record highs, with oceans risen sluggish and empty and all ice long disappeared all across a barren tree-less world with not a person left alive to hear or see.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner of London. (Ozymandias wikipage.)
I see that I’m already late on that plant photo.
It looks like Meadow Knapweed, a new invasive species and known to be a serious problem getting worse in much of the west.
It is starting to spread through Minnesota.
and
“Sep 9, 2018 — Meadow Knapweed is a relative newcomer to Minnesota and is currently on the Eradicate list along with several other Centaurea species, …”
There are a few related species of knapweed.
From the photo and looking at the bracts, it looks most like spotted knapweed.
Yes, Mary was scurrying around using Seek to identify plants, and was complaining about how almost everything was an invasive species.
Spotted knapweed violates the Geneva convention by using chemical weapons against other plants:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/wicked-weed-of-the-west-97008935/
This is known as allelopathy. They also aid the spread of hantavirus due to deer mice, though we helped by importing a fly intended to control spotted knapweed that have larva deer mice find tasty.
Lovely flower though.
Homo sapiens sapiens has to be the most invasive species ever.
I knew several Eurasian weeds are seriously invasive in North America, but I’d have never guessed about knapweed. They’re some of my favorite wild flowers.
We drove from Seattle to Michigan about a week ago. The windshield carnage seemed less than decades ago. Theodore Roosevelt National Park, however, was thick with grasshoppers. Maybe fifty would scatter with each step. And showy Spurge Hawkmoth caterpillars were common in our campsite, devouring the invasive plant it was introduced to control. Also, random wandering bison and fields of prairie dogs. While I’m rambling, we were surprised to spot flocks of several pelicans in Montana and Michigan.
At least, it is probably too far north for kudzu to thrive. Maybe.
We’ve got a non-native thistle growing in our yard. I think it’s the yellow knapweed but I’m no authority on any of these plants. The person who is, my partner and avid native plant person, points and says pull that up. So, I try to pull it up. It occasionally stings the heck out of my hand even wearing gloves.
But, we have an even worse invasive plant around us: Acacias. There is a little grove of them in our neighbors yard and they refuse to do anything about it. We were sitting outside the other day watching the seeds blow into our yard. Earlier in the spring there would be waves of Acacia pollen wafting across our yard with all the sneezing, coughing, and bleary eyes that come with that stuff.
The real problem with the Acacia is fire. Presumably the county has banned Acacia, but they’re not at the point of making people hack it out like they have the juniper in people’s front yards.
That sounds like yellow starthistle which is sometimes called yellow knapweed.
That is another invasive species that is causing real problems in the west.
So far it is mostly an arid lands plant, but given how California is drying out, that is going to be a lot of the state.
@robro : “But, we have an even worse invasive plant around us: Acacias. There is a little grove of them in our neighbors yard and they refuse to do anything about it. We were sitting outside the other day watching the seeds blow into our yard. Earlier in the spring there would be waves of Acacia pollen wafting across our yard with all the sneezing, coughing, and bleary eyes that come with that stuff.”
Which species of Acacia do you know?
Note that the Wattle (Acacia) species have sometimes been blamed unfairly allergy~wise – see :
https://anpsa.org.au/APOL2007/jan07-s3.html
[I did wait]
Flowers are the reproductive organs of those plants.
StevoR, allergies to the plant equivalent of spermatozoa. Just saying.
Some places in California have started to use goats to remove unwanted vegetation. It helps suppress the risk of firestorms.
I assume any unwanted vegetation in Minnesota provide less drastic problems. Triffids?