Creation Photos Around the World

This was from yesterday between jobs when I went hiking. That entire place is mushy. There is about a inch of standing water and if you stomp your foot and make a 2 inch deep shoe print, it fills up with water.



Pinewoods hibiscus.



Pitcherplant moth.

Some flower I forget the species. There are thousands of them growing.



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My garden and I would have evaporated before twenty days. I hope you have state of the art A.C.

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The butterflies thank you.

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Found this Polistes metricus “ metric paper wasp “ crawling around with its wings mostly missing yesterday. I think it got into line sap and the pine sap tore them off as they got away. But it’s just a guess based on seeing sap all around where I first saw it on a broken off pine limb. I don’t know wasps really and so someone else IDed it for me.

But I’ll remember it now. Dark red upper body with a black lower body and yellow lower limbs and feet. It’s actually very pretty. I did not have a jar with me otherwise I would have brought it back to my house and kept it feed and watered until it passed. But the best I could do was move it to a oak tree so that maybe it can make it a few days longer. Once they see wingless, they can’t return to their hive and they are a really good community species. Even sharing nests with species outside of their species , but in the same genus and have overlapping generation offspring that they care for. I guess they have been studied enough to even know if it’s going for a long flight or short flight when leaving the nest. Wikipedia had a decent amount of info on them.

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I somehow missed these when you first posted them @SkovandOfMitaze

Big fan of these sorts of radially arrayed flowers. I don’t seem to be able to take such rich close ups. This flower certainly rewards closer inspection.

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Pictures , at least mine, don’t do them any justice. They are small. There are thousands of them blooming among many others. Really beautiful. Waiting to find what pollinates it the most or feeds off of it.

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Pictures (I took about 1500) from our trip for the ASA 2022 meeting in San Diego:

Monday

Oxbow lakes on the Tennesse or Mississippi:

Joshua Trees in the Mojave National Preserve:


Spheroidal Weathering (on a boulder about the size of our van):

What happens when we go to the desert:


it rains.

An Ephedra (gnetophyte)

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Tuesday

The view from part of Mt. San Jacinto

Williamson’s Sapsucker (juvenile)

Brown-crested Flycatcher

An 8-pound pinecone

Lesser Goldfinch

A large (~35 mm wingspan) hairstreak

A very dark bluet

Oak Titmouse

Agave

A cholla

Bighorns (as the sign warned)

Part of the descent from the San Jacinto Mountains to the San Andreas Rift Valley

Great Blue Herons, Great Egrets, California Gulls (pale wings), Yellow-footed Gulls (large, dark wings), and Caspian Terns (red bills)

Black-necked Stilt

White-winged Dove

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I’ve been there–great place! We even got to dig fossils. And Colorado is a beautiful state.

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Wednesday

Bicolored Red-winged Blackbird

Female Great-tailed Grackle

Pair of Yellow-headed Blackbirds

Burrowing Owl burrow

Abert’s Towhee

California Gull

Bullock’s Oriole

Greater Roadrunner

Cattle Egret and Great Egret

White-faced Ibis (note the red face, Glossy Ibis’s is blue)

Long-billed Curlew

Burrowing Owl

Black Phoebe

Common Ground-Dove

Landscape near Ocotillo Wells (the very tall plants are the Ocotillo–Ocotillo is in the same order as kiwifruit, Impatiens, ebony, persimmon, heath, rhododendron, blueberry, Brazil nuts, phlox, primrose, new world pitcher plants, tea, and camellia).

Sunset from Borrego Springs

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I wish they all could be California gulls! (Apologies to Brian Wilson)

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That order sounds disordered on the face of it. So surprising. Looks like you’ve had a great trip.

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Hey! They’re not at all endangered here. Please, you keep them. But puns as shameless as my own are always appreciated. :wink:

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Many plant orders seem rather heterogenous, at least to non-experts. Ericales is among the most diverse ones, so there is some reason for the variety.

Neogastropoda would seem pretty comparable to most people, the main obvious synapomorphies are mobile-prey carnivory (a few families became grazers again), a siphon (tiny in some groups), and comparatively frequent large size (i.e. median might be 10 mm, instead of 4 mm). It probably contains about 40,000 species (estimated recent), and almost half of those are in one superfamily.

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Y’all take great pics! My quarterly contribution, both taken from the relative comfort of my deck.

You’ve heard of the seven-layer burrito; behold the seven-striped beetle! (Check out those antennae!)

Moonrise over Sandia Peak, 8/9/22.

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Enjoying all the beautiful organisms and landscapes on this thread. Figured I share a monochromatic scene from the Great White North. One of my dear study subjects (February, Saskatchewan, -40 C)

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COOL! Really!
This is exactly how I imagine all of Saskatchewan year round in my fantasy imagination of Canada north of Ontario. :blush:
What a wonderful photo!

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Tee Hee. The snow melts eventually, but the length of the winters certainly tries the patience :wink:

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As it gets hotter and our winters become icier down here in mid Michigan, your winters look like something I could learn to live with. But I am a pansy. So talking brave really is a joke. It is heartening to see real snow somewhere on earth these days, though.

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Yes, isn’t that the case—we should enjoy fluffy powdery snow while we still have it.
Michigan, eh? I was in Lansing a few years ago for an ornithology conference. Enjoyed a fieldtrip to see the endangered Kirtland’s Warbler. Good memories and beautiful landscapes there too!

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