It's About Nature

Every calorie of energy that has fueled every living creature (including you and your ancestors) throughout Planet Earth's 4.5 billion years history was/is manufactured at the base, by Primary Producers, via  photosynthesis The above Energy Pyramid is typical of any and all Energy Pyramids powering Ecosystems worldwide; i.e. they all function identically.   Pyramids are separated into different Trophic Levels. Each Trophic Level is comprised of species with similar niches i.e. it is a  species niche (function) within an ecosystem that determines which trophic level it has been placed in.   The two critically important Trophic Levels, the  1.Producers (aka Primary Producers) and  2.Primary Consumers, are under constant, sustained attack worldwide from enormous commercial operations using pesticides (herbicides and insecticides). Photosynthesis is the biochemical process that manufactures all the energy that fuels energy pyramids.  Nearly all of Earth's...

This is a relatively clean lake, not polluted or trashed.   The suspended mass that first appears in the background at 0:12 may look like plastic pollution but it is actually a mass of frog eggs.  And those milky-colored particles suspended throughout the water occur at the same time every year.  They are pollen from the Eastern White Pine trees.   

                At this public canoe/kayak launch people sometimes toss balls into the lake for their dogs to chase.  Some balls are lost.   American Toads are convinced the tennis ball is a female.   Toads are a terrestrial, woodland species, but every year toads come down to water in very early spring to mate.  The males arrive in the water first and begin trilling for the females to come.  And they do.  I was fortunate to be at one of the ponds on the cold April day that they began mating.  The last ice melted on this basin just days before and so the water they are in is close to 32 degrees F. 

  In eastern NA (at least) the *Dandelion is the first provider of food (nectar) for our beloved bees*.      But an obsession for the perfect lawn, combined with lawn company advertisements has transformed the Dandelion into a weed that must be killed in the spring.     From early boyhood I have been closely observing nature and later chose wildlife and ecology as a profession, specializing in habitat.    As a boy, I clearly remember that lawns were comprised of a *diversity of herbaceous plants*.  Today, these plants are called weeds.   The belief that Dandelions (and all the other broad-leaved herbaceous plants) are weeds amounts to man’s perversion of nature.     In those early years there was no such thing as a perfect grass lawn.   It simply did not exist and was not even a point of interest.     But over the last 50 years I have watched suburban America...