I was going to post this in Insects of the Day but I'm not sure it counts. I went to the fossil shop yesterday and bought a lump of amber with a bug trapped in it. On close inspection with the macro lens it looks to be a caddisfly species and would have been flying around somewhere between 34-56 million years ago. Sadly they're not a blood sucking species so I can't clone any dinosaurs from it
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
I think that's just a flaw in the material but I need more magnification to tell for sure sadly. Those two black lines in the background are something but I can't tell what. They're hairy and segmented but I think they might be plant material of some kind.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
This might not be directly nature-related but bear with me. I was on a beach on the weekend and collected these nurdles. They're known by beachcombers as "mermaids' tears" but the official name is given to them by the plastic recycling industry. A lot of the plastics we send off for recycling are cleaned, graded, and then melted down into these tiny pellets. They're then sold as raw material to companies who make things from plastic to be melted down again and reformed into all kinds of useless tat. As most of these companies are in places like China, the nurdles are bundled up and stuffed into the empty shipping containers that delivered said tat and are shipped across the world. Somewhere between being recycled and being reformed many will be lost and end up in the oceans, including entire container fulls that are lost over the side of ships. It's for this reason that they can now be found on almost every beach where you care to look for them. One beach in Cornwall was cleaned by a specialist machine and around 3.5 million of them were recovered. I found 115 in about ten minutes of looking in the area around where I was sitting so I can well believe this.
Nurdles are terrible for the environment and are consumed by all kinds of animals, presumably due to their resemblance to fish eggs. Birds regurgitate them in their pellets and they've been found in the stomach contents of all kinds of creatures. My small selection shows a wide variation between the shiny new ones that are still nice and clear, grading through as they yellow and roughen with age and weathering. The one I've singled out must have been drifting around the oceans for many years to pick up a few hitchhikers along the way. They're still kind of fascinating though and I'm particularly pleased with the red one.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
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