While @[email protected] provides an anthropogenic use for bat boxes, they are widely used in conservation.

Disturbance is putting a lot of pressure on bats. White nose fungus is also hammering bat populations. Anyway, bat boxes are artificial refugia - simulated habitat. These boxes, like other artificial refugia, such as bee boxes, need to be pretty carefully designed so they don’t do the following:

• thermally stress the animals - they won’t use them, or they’ll die if they freeze or fry in them
• act as traps - predators are smart, and will exploit poorly designed refugia
• promote disease, in the case of bee or bat boxes - refugia can be any shape or size, but ones that encourage multiple animals to use them can cause mortality through spreading disease

In general, refugia are at best temporary spaces while ecosystems recover from disturbance and natural habitat re-establishes. This is hard in the case of bats, because they need tree crevices (found in older trees) or rock outcrops and the like.

there’s some really cool papers out there on artificial refugia, if you want to nerd the fuck out about it. Cowan, did some great work around them. He’s a cool dude, and was super pumped to hear how his papers were being considered from a reclamation standpoint when I reached out to him: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/csp2.204

Howling

My dearest Fossil! Congratulations! Super proud of you dude - that’s not a small feat. My M.Sc. damn near did me in.

I can’t wait for the mental gymnastics anti-vaxxers use to try and dispute this.

McCarthy spins in his grave

Honestly, my thoughts too. It’s easy to be an arm chair activist and say what you would do (myself included) and an entirely other thing to actually intervene

Missing on the left:

Wild parsnip Cow parsnip Poison parsnip Giant hogweed

The sap from all of these cause terrible blisters when it gets on you and sunlight hits it

Dang. That’s a much better spelling. I was trying to figure out how to type it without it just saying bags.

Happy Birthday, OP. Trying to lose weight sucks. I miss the days when I was on the “see food” diet, but I’ve dropped 20 lbs since January and picked up some healthy habits along the way.

Watermelon is amazing, so I’d be all over this

Grinning at me Steve Urkel

Unrelated, but I saw this headline, and could hear both you and squidward swearing from here.

You’re really lucky. They were over-trapped and their populations cratered. They are making a comeback, but still.

I think I only caught a glimpse of one in my time in the field

It’s a pretty tight nit group. we are pretty live-and-let live. Some granola vibes that aren’t for me, but see the previous sentence about letting live. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a hard core environmentalists, but from the science side rather than the more utopian view the instance takes. I suppose that’s part of the solar punk movement though - they’re optimists about the future in the face of destruction. It’s inspiring and refreshing.

We have our own memes channel, some highly technical channels and some more political/anarchist channels (thus the punk).

Give us a browse

not nerd enough to see it

You would fit right in on our instance

I don’t suspect so - I’ve never tried it, but I would really like to.

I’m also not sure how tall it can get - depends on your growing season and the plant’s lifecycle

I’ve heard that you can grow a FUCK TON of potatoes with these.

What you do is you start the plant in one, let it grow, stack the next planter on top, and gradually fill with soil. Rinse repeat.

I’m not up on my dick energy idioms, nor do I care to be.

The guy’s is a douche canoe and that’s all there is to it.

Please.

I’m from Alberta. This is just big dick energy.

Besides, there are 4x4 crew vans with lift kits that the oil sands mines use to address the issues you’re talking about. Those are most certainly cheaper than this monstrosity, and if it was a work thing he’d have to have company decals on it.