Aliens are real and they live in Manhattan
Everyone is the expert in their own identity, you don't get to police others just because you don't understand. Anti-TERF, antifascist.
it’s so stupid that you can’t think your way out of the mental health trenches. like you can know exactly what is wrong, why it’s upsetting you, and you can walk yourself through all of it logically and Understand it but your brain just responds like
disability rights involves the right to do fuck all. the right to be a useless member of society and STILL be loved and cared for and have a fair standard of living. human beings are not defined by the capital we produce.
“We’re gonna be talking about the BOOBY! We’ll be talking about the WOODCOCK! Do you think that’s FUNNY, Butthead? Do you find it AMUSING that we’ll be talking about the SWALLOW? Yes, we’re also gonna be talking about the DICKCISSEL, the BUSHTIT, the COCK-OF-THE-ROCK, the SHAG… and we will DEFINITELY be spending a LOT of time talking about…GREAT TITS!!”
I’ve seen a few ~aesthetic~ photos of rock stacks in rivers recently and this is just a reminder that you are destroying habitat when you move rocks around in rivers and streams.
In addition to dragonfly nymphs, rocky river beds are home to lots of other larval invertebrates like damselflies, mayflies, water beetles, caddisflies, stoneflies, and a bunch of dipterans. Not to mention lots of fish and amphibians!
Plus large scale rock stacking can change the flow of a stream and lead to increased erosion.
Everything is something’s habitat. You might as well not go outside for fear of stepping on some larval beetle.
This is hugely missing the point. The idea is to enjoy what’s left of our natural spaces while having as little an impact as possible. It’s not difficult to avoid intentionally destroying habitat. I recommend looking into the Leave No Trace principle which is very important for conservation. Cynicism doesn’t help anything.
A few rock stacks here and there wouldn’t have much of an impact alone. But in parks that see thousands or even millions of visitors each year, when you have people like you saying, “sure, literal scientists and park rangers are telling me not to do this, but surely that doesn’t apply to ME,” the effect is huge. Please attempt to see the bigger picture. You are not so special that YOU get to ignore the rules and continue intentionally destroying habitat even after you’ve been told it’s harmful.
Benthic invertebrates in streams are a CRITICAL part of a lot of food webs — because they are so diverse, they have a lot of feeding strategies that move calories up the food web and nutrients into the ecosystem around them. Some consume oil-rich diatom films, a critical source of essential fatty acids throughout the food web, some shred leaves and twigs into tiny bits that decompose more easily, allowing streams to remain clear and flowing, some filter out particulates from the water making it clearer, some are predators, concentrating nutrients — and they do this as larvae, and then the adults fly out of the stream, bringing the nutrients and calories from the stream to the surrounding landscape. The whole ecosystem is richer because of the diversity of benthic macroinvertebrates — which is why it’s important to preserve their habitat, though this is more “maintain dissolved oxygen levels by protecting temperature and limiting sedimentation” and “have a mixture of shaded and unshaded stream reaches” day to day. I do think “Don’t destroy the physical habitat for art projects” is an easy action to take but like. It’s fine to do that OUT of the creek? Build the stacks of rocks on ridge tops, where they aren’t habitat for stressed critical species? (caveat: I am in western North America and I have limited understanding of other parts of the world.)
A good addition that goes into more detail about WHY these critters are important to their particular ecosystems that I didn’t bother with on the original post because I didn’t think it would get so much traction.
But I’d say don’t stack rocks anywhere in parks. If you want to stack rocks on your private property, go nuts.
