This is the stuff of nightmares until you realize what it is

…and…of course…they are endangered for all the usual reasons. Including Plastic.

w
v
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090315224258.htm
They survived the extinction of the dinosaurs. They’re descendants of one of the oldest family trees in history, spanning 100 million years. But today leatherback turtles, the most widely distributed reptiles on Earth, are threatened with extinction themselves, in large part due to the carelessness of humans…

…Since leatherbacks prefer eating jellyfish, it’s widely believed they mistake bags or other plastics for their meals. Since jellyfish and marine debris concentrate where ocean water masses meet, leatherbacks feeding in these areas are vulnerable to ingesting plastic.

Once leatherbacks ingest plastic, thousands of spines lining the throat and esophagus make it nearly impossible to regurgitate. The plastic can lead to partial or even complete obstruction of the gastrointestinal tract, resulting in decreased digestive efficiency, energetic and reproductive costs and, for some, starvation.

“Plastics ingestion doesn’t always cause death, but there are clearly health risks to the turtles,” says Dr.James.

….Leatherback turtles are classified as critically endangered world-wide. The true population size is not precisely known, as only adult females come ashore for nesting in remote tropical locations. During the summer and fall, Canadian waters support the highest density of foraging leatherbacks in the North Atlantic.

wv wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

Yes, our destruction of the biosphere continues unabated.

Everyone should really enjoy awesome creatures like the leatherback sea turtle while they can because we will likely be the last generation to see them.

—————-

There’s just a shitload of life-forms on this little dysfunctional planet.

w
v

That shitload is proof it is a very functional planet.

Time for this again.

—

For a Coming Extinction Related Poem Content Details

BY W. S. MERWIN

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices

Join your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important

Guys

Do me a favor.

Trim the quoted material in your posts before posting. It’s easy. I have been doing it for you. But you can do it yourselves. Just blue out then delete the excess.

A lot of the time, the reason posts look readable and orderly is because a mod edited it. (Though more mods should be doing that as a matter of course, at least with their own posts.)

So it’s very simple and easy to cut down on the number of quotations included per post. I would appreciate help with that because sometimes I, too, just want to read things and think about them without constantly playing janitor.

…

bnw wrote:

OK will do.

Thank you! I honestly do appreciate it.

Cinereous mourner chicks mimic poisonous caterpillars to avoid predation when young.

I really like that sentence. For some strange reason, it makes me think of Gerald Manley Hopkins:

The Windhover

By Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Poetry Foundation: The Windhover

To Christ our LordTo Christ our Lord This epigraph dedicated the poem to Jesus while echoing the Latin phrase, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, the Jesuit motto meaning “To the Greater Glory of God.”

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Sorry for the terrible formatting above. The poem is much better read on the site linked to.

Nittany,

Was that caption yours? Again, pretty cool language.

nittany ram wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Sorry for the terrible formatting above. The poem is much better read on the site linked to.

Nittany,

Was that caption yours? Again, pretty cool language.

No, the caption was attached to the photo. I didn’t care for it myself because the “when young” part is redundant since the caption already mentioned nit’s a chick. I do like the poem though.

I also like the name of the bird. Ceroneous mourner. I like melodic names. My all-time favorite is Serratia marcesens.

Lovely, right?

It’s a bacterium found in your GI tract that we’ll sometimes isolate from urine specimens when the patient has a UTI.

A great deal of the best English-language poetry from the 17th through the 19th century was filled with apparent knowledge of birds, botany and biology. And alliteration, too.

Not sure how much came from the GI tract, though. James Joyce in the 20th century, however, utilized GI in his great novel, Ulysses. He had a lot of guts.

;>)