Hi, I'm Audrey, not in my twenties anymore, from Eastern Europe, now moved to the land of Maple Syrup and Bacon. Just here to make stalking blogs easier.
Trees, like animals, can also experience albinism, though it is extremely rare.
the reason it’s rare is because without chlorophyll, the plant can’t get energy, and dies shortly after sprouting unless it has some other source of food. so if you see a plant as big as the one in the picture that doesn’t have any green in its leaves, it’s getting its nutrition from the roots of a neighboring plant of the same species, feeding on the sugars created by the other plant’s photosynthesis.
albino plants are basically vampires.
For a long time, scientists thought they were parasites, and couldn’t figure out why the bigger plants didn’t release chemicals to kill them.
Turns out, the lil’ ghost redwoods benefit their hosts by filtering toxins and acting as a sort of backup immune system.
They’re vampires, and they’re commensal, symbiotic mutualists!
this is super cool! I had no idea
This is among the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
we’ve already discovered forests where trees share nutrients with young or disadvantaged trees and forests where trees can ask their neighbors for some extra food (they literally send a signal requesting aid, via the web of fungus that connects their roots) and forests where surrounding tees will keep a tree alive even when it has been reduced to a stump through some tragedy…
so, while i love the playfulness of “vampire” and i commend the specificity of “commensal, symbiotic mutualists” i think it’s worth considering, at this point, if “member of the community” might not be at least as apt
The world is so much more beautiful, fascinating, and complex than we know.
when you say “great lakes” and “cursed” in the same sentence, we usually think you’re just talking about Lake Superior.
the great lakes are huge, sure! combined, they’re roughly the size of fucking France.
but Superior is the granddaddy of them all.
the largest of the great lakes in terms of surface area, depth, and overall volume, Lake Superior contains 2,903 cubic miles of water, or 10% of the world’s entire surface freshwater supply.
that’s enough to cover the entire surface area of North AND South America in a solid foot of ice-cold murkish water, and probably also a bunch of confused sturgeons. yow!
but sturgeons aren’t all this lake contains, by any means!
it’s also full of corpses.
see, Lake Superior is just SO fucking hugebig and deep (about 1000 feet at its deepest point) that it doesn’t warm up very quickly, even in the depths of summer! its northerly location and the amount of time it spends frozen over each year means that this lake reaches an average surface temperature of 46-56 degrees fahrenheit, even in the hottest months.
don’t even think about the coldest months.
that’s cold enough to kill you dead as a Sim with a deleted pool ladder if you fall in and can’t get out! and it’s ALSO cold enough that if you do die, your body will just sink into the icy depths, and stay there. you won’t rot, and there isn’t even anything alive down there that might consider your corpsicle a worthy feast because there’s so little oxygen; you’re basically just stuck down there in the world’s largest meat freezer for the rest of eternity.
but you’re in good company! since everyone who dies on the lake and sinks to the bottom is still there, there are an estimated 10,000 corpses lying around on the lakebed right now!
(there are a number of explorable shipwrecks in Superior that are known to still, uh, have crew on board, so to speak. divers are expected to leave them alone and treat their death sites respectfully.)
and that’s not even counting the literal thousands of years humans were paddling around on the lakes in pre-colonial times either, so in all honesty that’s probably lowballing it.
and that doesn’t seem likely to change, anytime soon- as long as the lake exists, those corpses are just going to be stuck down there, waiting around for whatever comes next.
so uh anyway, if the concept of the eternal preservation of your mortal form bothers you, stay AWAY from that lake! and maybe just become a volcano researcher instead, I dunno.
sheesh.
You know, Superior has a very deserved reputation as the winter-blooded reaper of the Great Lakes (and we love that for her) but Lake Michigan is actually the statistically more deadly lake. More swimmers and the shape of the lake, with its riptides and longshore tides, means that more people drown there than in Superior.
Fun related fact from your unfriendly neighborhood criminal lawyer! Michigan has this law:
At first glance, it sounds like it criminalizes this behavior:
But actually it exists specifically because of the unrotting dead in Lake Superior. See, the wreck of the Eddie Fitz was located, and dive teams took video of it in 1994. The Edmund Fitzgerald went down in 1975, with all hands, and some of them were visibly still at their posts in the documentary film made about the discovery of the site. If you do the math, that’s not actually a super long time between the sinking and the discovery of it, and so there were still quite a few surviving relatives of the crew who were, understandably, upset about the airing of the footage. They also largely did not want their loved ones to be retrieved from the wreck, and so they remain. And to protect them, MCL 750.160a was passed, as well as some similar legislation in other regions that border Superior.
And so Superior keeps her dead for all the endless years to come, and when we send the living down to visit, they do so without cameras rolling.
Eddie Fitz day is the 10th, so I hope you’re ready for lakeposting
Very interesting and all… But I want to know what’s going on with that map of Europe and all of the Balkan countries sunk in the Sea? I mean I’m sure Romania would love having an opening to the Adriatic Sea.
ALT
