Nature involves Science, too! (Nobody Cares...)

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The turkeys can fight back.

In suburban New England, gobbling gangs roam the streets. Wild Turkeys, each weighing in at 10 or 20 pounds, loiter in driveways, trapping residents inside their homes. They lounge on decks, damage gardens, and jump on the car hoods. Flocks of 20 or 30 birds roost in backyards, while particularly plucky turkeys chase down mailmen and the occasional police cruiser. They even fly (granted, not very well) across highways; one left a turkey-size dent in an ornithologist’s windshield. So far in 2018, the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries & Wildlife, or MassWildlife, has received 150 turkey-related calls and complaints, primarily from residents of densely populated counties in the southeast and Cape Cod. These are the Wild Turkeys of New England, and they’ve taken over.

The turkeys’ subjugation of New England residents is a relatively recent phenomenon.
 

Rose Karuna

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Dakota Tebaldi

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More than two years after Kilauea last erupted, there was an eruption again at the crater beginning last night at 930pm local.



So just for a brief recap, for decades the crater at the summit of Kilauea looked like this:



Then in 2018 there was the massive eruption on the flank of the volcano where lava erupted from numerous fissures in the former Leilani Estates neighborhood. That eruption effectively drained the lava conduit underneath the summit crater, so that for weeks after the eruption the crater floor sank and eventually completely collapsed, leaving this very deep new crater with a lake of putrid water at the bottom:




For the last two days, seismic instruments have detected the new magma intrusion in the summit area. The new summit eruption is from several new fissures about halfway up the side of the crater, with lava flowing down and forming a new lava lake in the bottom of the crater where the water used to be (it's gone now).

Here's a timelapse of the eruption taken by thermal-imaging webcams. You can see the VERY heavy steam plume during the first half of the eruption, which is the small water lake evaporating; the steam mostly clears out once it's gone:

 
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They used to let tourists walk right up to the edge of Halemaumau. It's a super alien environment, like you're on another planet.
 
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Dakota Tebaldi

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Hey there guys - would you like to take a free college Geology class?

Hmmm....okay, me rephrase that. Would you like to watch free actual college geology class lectures for your own edification, although you won't qualify for credit or get to take exams or anything like that?

Well you're in luck! This guy Nick Zentner has been teaching geology at Central Washington University for almost 30 years. On his YouTube channel you can find videos of several community lectures he gave a few years ago on topics specific to PNW geology (some super interesting stuff in that region - like the Missoula floods, flood basalts, and Juan de Fuca Plate tsunamis, etc). More recently, last year he gave several livestream lectures from home during the pandemic. He's got a great teaching flow, he's seriously watchable - his community lectures are 1 to 1.5 hours long but I recommend checking them out if you can.

He has decided to livestream his entire winter-quarter Geology 101 class on YouTube, which starts tomorrow (Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2021). Once it begins classes will be every weekday except Wednesdays at 10AM PT, which is 12PM CT - calculate as appropriate - and the lectures will be 50 minutes long. Since he'll actually be teaching a class, there won't be any audience interaction via YouTube like there was with his previous livestreams. But, basically, you get a free college-level intro Geology course for funsies. And as normal for YouTube, the videos remain up so you can still watch them even if you can't make the streams live.

Details here:


And you can check out Nick's channel here.
 

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Kamilah Hauptmann

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Cross posting a reply to a better thread:

In 1826 the last beaver was shot in NL.
in 1988 they reintroduced the species in the wild again.
We are now close to 4000 of them out there again.
Some provinces will have to start to regulate them within a couple of years I guess.
We don't have those vast chuncks of wilderness like Canada, where they can do their business almost everywhere as they please.
On a serious note, remembering this:

Semi-coherent semi-rant ahead:
I remember the discussion around this pointing the finger a wealthy landowners around the cities thinking nothing of directing flood waters into the towns. Remove all the trees and the beavers removed all the nature built waterflow stopping. Beaver evolved alongside the ecosystem and the fish, even for tens of thousands of years.

tl;dw: Beaver created these fertile valley bottoms and fish spawning grounds in the first place.

Then there's what happens when you put beaver where they weren't evolved alongside the ecosystem for millennia.
 
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Lexxi

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Cross posting a reply to a better thread:



On a serious note, remembering this:

Semi-coherent semi-rant ahead:
I remember the discussion around this pointing the finger a wealthy landowners around the cities thinking nothing of directing flood waters into the towns. Remove all the trees and the beavers removed all the nature built waterflow stopping. Beaver evolved alongside the ecosystem and the fish, even for tens of thousands of years.

tl;dw: Beaver created these fertile valley bottoms and fish spawning grounds in the first place.

Then there's what happens when you put beaver where they weren't evolved alongside the ecosystem for millennia.

Beavers used to be bigger. Well, some of them.
Castoroides: The Giant Beaver That Roamed Prehistoric Earth (allthatsinteresting.com)
 

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If you want to keep some nature in a very densely populated country like the NL, you have to choose between extinction of all larger animals or regulate their numbers trough hunting. Our forests are relative tiny patches and more haggard park landscapes then real wilderness.
So we have to regulate. Foresters and hunters shoot all kinds of animals when they reach a number that is thought to be the maximum for their area or move them elsewhere if possible.
That way we can keep as much diversity as possible.

At the moment the wolf is reintroducing itself. We welcome that. It means more self-regulation from nature.
After a decade of only spotting trespassing singles, we now have a first pack in the middle of the country in our largest nature reserve.
That's fine, but the moment a pack settles in smaller patch of nature, they will have to be moved or regulated.

Same goes for the beavers, deer, badgers, foxes, bizon and musk rats, rabbits, hares, geese near airports, Highland cows and wild horses.