Tootfinder

Mariposa lily, Calochortus leichtlinii, in Yosemite National Park
#naturalist #photography #wildflower

A cool thing about the Seattle Frontrunners group runs is that this barred owl (Strix varia) is not even the first owl I've seen this close on a run. (This one was along the ravine trail in Ravenna Park this morning.)
#naturalist #wildlife

So anyone at the beach around eastern Toronto GTA will be noticing significantly colder water due to an UPWELLING resulting from recent prolonged winds from the NW.
This process is explained in a recent video for Lake Michigan from 13 News western Michigan.
https://youtu.be/B5vmkfnYWZE?feature=s

Wrote a quick explainer of our new paper, led by Karolina Heyduk, showing that Joshua trees can use water-saving CAM photosynthesis, which should be mighty handy for a desert plant facing hotter summers and more stressful droughts
https://lab.jbyoder.org/2025/09/03…

Yosemite Falls framed by California black oak, Quercus kelloggii
#naturalist #photography #YosemiteNationalPark

I love a good borage: Forget-me-nots, Myosotis scorpiodes, outside Acadia National Park back in June
#naturalist #photography #wildflower

Terrible backlit photos of bird this morning feeding at insects at corner of the windows. Quite active and hard to see well, but still very sure it is a female american redstart from the very distinct yellow bands on the tail with a very dark tip. #birds #birdsofmastodon

Wrote up some thoughts about LLM chatbots that I haven't, I think, quite seen expressed in these terms: as they exist right now, they're really just another attempt to corral internet users inside one tech company's walled garden
https://denimandtweed.jbyoder.org/2025

Huckleberries (Vaccinium membranaceum) and wild blueberries (V. deliciosum) along the trail to Snow Lake last week.
https://flic.kr/p/2roeRnH
Taxonomy is tricky: Both of these species have "blueberry" and "huckleberry" among their recognized common names.

Our partners at the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory have found cyanobacteria microcystin toxins in the western basin of Lake Erie April 28, far earlier this year than ever before. The season starts earlier and lasts longer due to #ClimateChange.

White-breasted nuthatch, Sitta carolinensis, in absolutely classic nuthatch form up at Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park
#naturalist #bird #wildlife

AI would have done the patterns slightly wrong, relative to the mathematically perfect patterns that nature produces deterministically. https://ecoevo.social/@danmccullough/114698742002848774

Dan McCullough (@danmccullough@ecoevo.social)
Attached: 1 image Contrary to first glance, this was not created by AI. No, this was created by gardening. 😁 Sempervivum aka Hens & Chicks #Gardens #Plants #Succulents

With a record heatwave starting tomorrow, #ShowYourStripes day is timely.🥵
The #GreatLakes have helped to moderate warming, but even in southern Ontario we see a clear pattern of significantly increased warming during the last 25 years.

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
Did you know some #copepods can "porpoise" out of the water, even though they are only mm sized? The forces required for them to break the significant surface tension of the water is enormous, 10x larger than other animals scaled to size. This requires swim…

An American dipper, Cinclus mexicanus, living up to its name at Snow Lake earlier this week. These guys are aquatic songbirds, basically thrushes who saw what ducks do and decided it looked fun
#naturalist #wildlife #bird

Sierra lupines, Lupinus grayi, in the Yosemite Valley about a month ago
#naturalist #wildflower

Randall Monroe's recent "xkcd What if" video has a Great Lakes connection.
"What if you funneled Niagara Falls through a straw?"
Super cool system where we did fieldwork some year ago.
Kudos for mentioning trouble with the Niagara Board of Control. 🏅
https://youtu.be/pfbzrrcQZjs?featu…

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
Mating by copepods is a complicated process since they are always at risk of predation by other plankton or fishes. Male #copepods carefully mechanically and chemically track a receptive female, capture them, and deposit an adhesive spermatophore near the genital open…

A new paper projecting Joshua tree habitat under future climate based on incredibly high-resolution distribution data, from Joshua Tree Genome Project collaborators at USGS. They estimate up to 80% loss of suitable habitat by 2100 under the worst-case climate scenario.
#JoshuaTree #science

Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) posted about an analysis done by David R. Hagen related to his "missing 11th" comic. Great read, which includes some nice statistical analysis, but more interestingly, bias and artifacts.
https://bsky.app/profile/xkcd.com/post/3lrxgvl677k2w

The proposed sell-off of federal lands in the Senate budget bill includes a LOT of Joshua tree habitat—the trees grow in some of the largest areas of undeveloped land in the lower 48 states
The place where eastern and western Joshua trees hybridize, north of Creech AFB, is included
#JoshuaTree #USpolitics

This collared pika, Ochotona collaris, popped up on a boulder by the path to the Snow Lake overlook and sure seemed like it had something to say
#naturalist #wildlife #photography

Two national parks, two American robins (Turdus migratorius): in Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park; and at the summit of Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park
#naturalist #wildlife #photography

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
The new Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite is crazy accurate. It can measure ocean altimetry to a mm, imaging internal waves and small sub eddies (rotating mixing zones). Tiny changes in height happen when water swirls (try it in a sink) with greater height at the edges due to centripetal force. These may be even more important for temperature &a…

The recording of my IDEA talk is up on the #Evol2025 YouTube channel, and I've thrown that together with a PDF copy of the slide deck and a bibliography: https://lab.jbyoder.org/2025/06/21/a-b…

Lady's slipper, Cypripedium acaule, along the carriage roads in Acadia National Park last month
#naturalist #wildflower #photography

Congratulations on the retirement of Bill Curry after 13 years as head of the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, following an already amazing, full career at Wood's Hole Oceanographic Insitution where he was a leader in marine geology, #climate and #carbon cycling research.

Pacific wren, Troglodytes pacificus, along the Merced River in Yosemite National Park
#naturalist #photography #bird #wildlife

In these trying times, let me offer an Atlantic puffin, Fratercula arctica, swimming near the Petit Manan breeding colony off the coast of Maine
#naturalist #wildlife #bird

A watchful Wilson's warbler, Cardellina pusilla, along the trails in Discovery Park last month
#naturalist #wildlife #bird

Let freedom wing?
Canada jay, Perisoreus canadensis, at the summit of Rattlesnake Ledge outside Seattle
#naturalist #wildlife #bird

Interesting study of eastern Joshua tree mycorrhizal associations from trees near the Dome Fire burn in Mojave National Preserve, with sampling stratified by season
#ecology #mutualism #JoshuaTree …

And here's Half Dome
#naturalist #photography #landscape #mountains

Photographed a new lupine — harlequin lupine, Lupinus stiversii — in Yosemite National Park over the weekend
#naturalist

Midmorning view up the Yosemite Valley
#naturalist #landscape #photography #YosemiteNationalPark

Got a new op-ed in LNC/LancasterOnline this morning, on the importance of the curiosity-driven science the National Science Foundation is supposed to support
"For every Thermus aquaticus there are hundreds of scientific projects that end in nothing more than a peer-reviewed research article and some fond memories of fieldwork. But we need those hundreds of curiosity-driven studies to find that one lucky, world-changing discovery."