100%. He played the long game and boy, it’s a crushing victory

Not constant, actually, my professor emphasized that after being completely dessicated, when rehydrated about 80% of the plant will revive perfectly functional

Yeahhhh, he’s bumbling around these days

Because I was really excited and my apartment sucks, it is what it is

I can’t waaaaiiiit, no i can’t wait

I’m telling you, spend a few days actually looking for and actually SEEING moss, it’ll blow your mind

There is a strip of grass beside the driveway to my complex’s parking structure with one tree in it.

That tree and the surrounding grass has at LEAST five species of moss living on it, so I just slow down on my walk to the car and appreciate those diverse, weird little plants

Liverworts are one of the oldest living ancestors of modern plants, their life cycles are kinda weird, they look more like something that grows in a petri dish than a plant, and this one looks like snake skin

I just finished a two week, three credit-hour crash course primarily on mosses, but it included liverworts and hornworts a bit, too. So to find one in the wild was really cool because it’s the first time in my life I’ve seen one.

They’re just weird and I like em

Ah HA, you’ve fallen for the same trap i did. The veins in leaves are actually described as “vein-like” and are purely structural. Likewise, the stems are structural, mosses are non-vascular

I’m really salty because it mirrored my thoughts about the research almost exactly, but I’m loathe to give attaboys to it

I mean, I value the knowledge as well as the job prospects

But also, take it easy, i didn’t personally insult you

I mean, it’s a matter of perspective, i guess.

I did a final assignment that was a research proposal, mine was the assessment of various methods of increasing periphyton biomass (clearing tree cover over rivers and introducing fertilizers to the water) in order to dilute mercury bioaccumulation in top river predators like trout and other fish people eat

There’s a lot of tangentially related research, but not a ton done on the river/riparian food webs in the GSMNP specifically and possible mitigation strategies for mercury bioaccumulation.

OBVIOUSLY my proposal isn’t realistic. No one on earth is gonna be like “yeah sure, go ahead and chop down all the trees over this river and dump chemicals in that one, on the off chance it allows jimbob to give trout to his pregnant wife all year round”

I’d say it’s good at things you don’t need to be good

For assignments I’m consciously half-assing, or readings i don’t have the time to thoroughly examine, sure, it’s perfect

The only substantial uses i have for it are occasional blurbs of R code for charts, rewording a sentence, or finding a precise word when I can’t think of it

This is my stance exactly. ChatGPT CANNOT say what I want to say, how i want to say it, in a logical and factually accurate way without me having to just rewrite the whole thing myself.

There isn’t enough research about mercury bioaccumulation in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for it to actually say anything of substance.

I know being a non-traditional student massively affects my perspective, but like, if you don’t want to learn about the precise thing your major is about… WHY ARE YOU HERE

Look up keystone species, they’re the best bang for your buck

I really appreciate that! I made sure to make most of the things I planted look intentional, because my desire for wildness isn’t realistic in suburbia.

So I labeled every species with sharpie on paint sticks and defined borders, in the hopes that the new owners don’t just tear it all out

I did the math, though, and my gardens are roughly 1.8% of the lawn. Nowhere near large enough.

I told my wife that it is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to me that at least 20% of our next yard is native plants and (she doesn’t know this) a functional ecosystem.

I read “Nature’s Best Hope” by Doug tallamy this semester and it gave me a glimmer of hope against my almost total conviction that things are beyond saving

Yeeahhh I know, that was there when we bought the house a couple years ago and I never got around to replacing them. We’re moving, anyway, and I didn’t have time to grow bushes to replace them

Honestly I’m probably just gonna wash the bowl out and pack it. I’m not uptight about my starter, I’ve killed and restarted mine at least 20-30 times, and I don’t subscribe to the almost mythological status people associate with old starters.

The microbiome is going to adjust to the way you treat it, what you feed out, and (to a much lesser degree) where it is. It doesn’t fucking matter that 100,000,000 generations ago the yeast was French lol