A Trigona stingless bee gathers nectar and pollen from a coral flower. Minca, Colombia.
#bees #pollinators #Trigona #Insects
As an update on the Twitter/Brazil thing, BlueSky is full of newly arrived Brazilians looking around and posting reaction GIFs. More than here, for what it's worth.
#BlueSky #Twitter
Opinion: biological taxonomy should mostly be done in databases, rather than papers.
Hard to pick a favorite ant, but Cephalotes turtle ants, which hold treetop territories in the American tropics, are high on my list. A photo gallery:
#Cephalotes #Ants #Insects #Photography
https://www.alexanderwild.com/Ants/Taxonomic-List-of-Ant-Genera/Cephalotes
Bluesky has lost a few big accounts this week related to inadequate moderation, and it feels like the momentum it had as a Twitter competitor is fading.
Not sure the world needs yet more photographs of leafcutter ants carrying leaves, but I thought this one turned out pretty good.
Atta cephalotes, from Colombia.
#Atta #Ants #Insects #Nature
This AI is just expensive auto-complete, forgetting what the question even was before putting a string of words together. Do I want to kill the oleander or save it?
#AI #AINonsense
Insane amount of light pollution coming from the Tesla factory in Austin. Just immense, and pointless.
#lightpollution #Tesla
Climate change has come for the west coast Douglas Fir forests.
#Climate #trees
Today’s gardening project: put up trellises at the new house with the hopes of covering the whole wall with butterfly plants by summer.
Now I just need to source some Passiflora and Aristolochia.
Texas sky update. #atxwx
Dall-e is not good at this.
"Sketch of a spider with the correct number of legs"
#GenerativeAI #Spiders #AIFail
A gallery of mosquitoes.
#Insects #Mosquitoes #photography
nostr:npub1dvvvvyqp0st7ea8ske44shn3a4jn27wx70v0hkuw44l3m786kchqamcqfy I have some issues with the premise they use to sell this, that expert ID’s are “error-prone” so we’re just going to use AI to identify insects to the level of order (like, a butterfly from a beetle). Experts make mistakes, but that’s setting the bar below the floor for their alternative.
Still, the tech itself looks promising.
Apparently children in Texas aren't supposed to learn about Anne Frank, either. I wonder why?
#Texas
Shortly after adopting a strict policy prohibiting discussion of gender and blocking the use of preferred pronouns, the violent extremists who took over the Katy school district near Houston have banned books by Dr. Suess, Judy Blume, and Eric Carle.
Republicans have gone fucking insane.
#Texas
nostr:npub1vyrx2prp0mne8pczrcvv38ahn5wahsl8hlceeu3f3aqyvmu8zh5s7kfy55 go fuck your self you fucking nazi
This isn't the end of the Ken Paxton saga, btw.
He's dodged a political bullet in the TX senate by avoiding removal by his fellow mobsters. But there's a big federal corruption case in the works, and he's finally scheduled to go to trial next year on his existing securities fraud charge.
#Texas
One of the largest monuments to human hatred ever constructed has an environmental toll, it turns out.
#borderwall #biodiversity
I mean, I do care about the state prosecuting journalists on generic free speech grounds, sure.
But Assange was a weapon, not a journalist. And life in the United States is measurably worse because of his actions.