Thanks for posting about the spotted lantern fly. I'm actually in the ground zero of where they entered the us. My family works in a vineyard next to the Martin Stone Quarry which imported the stone that had the original egg sack on them from China. We've been fighting to stay alive out here. If you have any questions I'd be glad to answer them the best I can. I don't know where you are irl but if they haven't made it to you yet be thankful. But if they do good luck
I’m in Indiana, so not yet, but it’s just a matter of time. How have they affected your area?
@glumshoe ,Sorry for the slow reply, it’s harvest season right now and things can be hectic. They slowly increased in number over the first few years then suddenly you couldn’t go 10 feet without seeing a dozen. We currently are having the lowest crop yields we’ve ever seen and we aren’t equipped to handle such low quantities of fruit. We normally can produce enough to have 200+ cases of our Rosé but, at best we’ve got maybe 30 cases if we can manage it. and right now that’s a big if. In general its rough. In the summer the sidewalks in town are littered with smashed red wings and ‘honeydew’ {read:the sap like dropping from the lantern fly} . The high school marching band would have a contest to see what section could kill the most without breaking formation (saxophone with 67 during a single practice if I recall). The only pesticides that seem to affect them are frankly horrible and kill all insect life that it comes in contact with. It’s so bad that you legally where only permitted by the government to use it twice a year due to its effects, but local farms and I suspect a few exterminators in the area have been given permission to use it more frequently. It helped a bit, and I could be paranoid but I haven’t seen any bees this year. Not even the carpenter bees that lived in our deck. The paper/mud wasps and hornets are still there, but even their hives seem less abundant. Normally they love harvest as the sugars in the grapes draw the yellow jackets, but I think I only saw one or two instead of the dozens that I’m used to. There also have been gradually less wild fruit as the lantern flies drain the sap and leave them open to mold before they can even properly produce.
A few local colleges are trying to study them, Penn state and the department of agriculture in particular are leading the efforts. They banded a lot of trees with sticky tapes and it works alright when they are still nymphs, but the adults just walk right over them. The best way we’ve found has been where they remove as many of the Tree of Heaven(Ailanthus), a highly invasive species it its own right and shared native favorite to spotted lantern flies, and leave only a handful as poisoned bait trees. Since they are one of their only predators in the us it’s safer. I can say first hand, it’s a strange sight to see a tree surrounded by a 2-3 inch deep carpet of dead lantern flies. It helps, but they just keep coming.
We were placed in a “voluntary quarantine” a few years ago, but you can guess how help full the voluntary part made it. large shipping trucks constantly move through our area. Their eggs just look like a splash of mud. And my family watched as a full adult sat on the front of our car and stayed there like it was nothing as we drove at highway speeds. I’m not going to lie and say it doesn’t scare the hell out of me. This one insect is the reason that the entire wine industry in the Koreas was nearly wiped out and we have less research and next to native predators to help fight back. If these reach any big fruit producing region I don’t know what we can do.
so yeah, If you see one kill it on sight.
(helpful tip, if you try to come at it from behind it will take off, but if it sees you coming from the front it accepts the inevitable)
The insect in question:
Penn State Extension people talk about these guys like it is only a matter of time until they are everywhere simply because of their life cycle and how prolifically they spread. Don’t move your firewood, don’t buy Christmas trees from this area and move them out, don’t buy nursery stock from this area, don’t buy masonry or vehicles or basically anything from this area without careful inspection lol basically we fucked
The extension officer at the grower’s meeting last year talked about one picture she had seen in a lanternfly infested area of their fave host tree (Ailanthus) overhanging a railyard with trains that shipped all over. It’s only a matter of time.
This being the specific area (as of 2018 but I can’t find a more recent map). Berks County is specifically where it started as is still the worst. The isolated bit in Virginia apparently received stone shipments from the location where it started.
i live right in the middle of the external quarantine zones and i can’t even begin to explain how bad it is
they were swarming downtown where i live (while i’m not at school) to the point that they completely covered the bases of four lamp posts, and there were hundreds (if not thousands) flying and hopping around
if you see one, kill it immediately
by the way, their egg sacks look like this:
scrape them off of trees and destroy them immediately if you see them, but just know they can be extremely hard to spot
“Diné Pride coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, when patrons at a historic gay bar in New York City fought back against violent police raids in 1969. The protests are widely credited with springboarding the modern gay civil rights movement in the U.S.
This year’s Diné Pride is infused with that history, themed Sacredness Before Stonewall — focusing attention on honoring transgender women of color and their history in indigenous culture.
“Since our creation, the Diné people have acknowledged and revered LGBTQ and especially the trans community in our leadership,” said Alray Nelson, founder of Diné Equality and board member for Diné Pride. “Our theme, Sacredness Before Stonewall, is just a way that we are decolonizing and indigenizing Pride for us.”
Photo: Ophelia Shondee (left) and Bonnie Gillespie kiss during their marriage ceremony at Diné Pride. Same-sex marriage is illegal through Navajo courts, so the couple, who have been together for 13 years, had to get their marriage license through an Arizona court, outside the reservation. [Cayla Nimmo for NPR]
Mushrooms are the organisms that keep on giving.
They grow and feed the soil by breaking down organic matter. For centuries,
they’ve also been a staple in our diet.
Recently, people have started taking a closer look at mushrooms,
and more specifically, mycelium — the hidden root of mushrooms — as an
engineering material to produce goods like surfboards, packaging materials, furniture and even architecture.
As far as natural materials go, there’s
never been anything as versatile and cost-effective as fungi, says Sonia
Travaglini, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, who
is collaborating with artist and mycologist Philip Ross to unlock the
seemingly infinite potential of fungi.
Myceliumcan grow into any shape or size (the largest in the world blankets an entire forest in
Oregon). They can be engineered to be as hard and strong as wood or brick,
as soft and squishy as foam, or even smooth and flexible, like fabric.
Unlike other natural materials, mushrooms
can rely on their recycling properties to break down organic matter so you
can grow a lot of it very quickly and cheaply just by feeding it biodegradable
waste. In as little as two weeks, you can cultivate a hunk of mushroom that’s
brick-sized.
That mycelium actually takes in waste and carbon dioxide as it
grows (one species of fungi even eats
plastic trash) instead of expelling byproducts makes it far superior to other
forms of production.
Plus, when you’re done with mushroom,
you can compost it or break up the material to grow more mycelium from it.
“And, unlike forming synthetic
materials, which have to be made while very hot or under pressure, all of which
takes a lot of energy to create those conditions, mycology materials grow from
mushrooms which grow in our normal habitat, so it’s much less energy-intensive,”
said Travaglini.
In the lab,
Travaglini and other researchers crush, compress, stretch, pull and bend mycelium
to test the amount of force the material can tolerate.
They found that mycelium is
incredibly strong and can withstand a lot of compression and tension.
Most materials are only strong from
one direction. But mycology materials are tough from all directions and can
absorb a lot force without breaking. So it can withstand as much weight as a
brick, but won’t shatter when you drop it or when it experiences a hard impact,
said Travaglini.
As one of the newer organisms
receiving an application in biomimetics, a field of science that looks to
imitate nature’s instinctive designs to find sustainable solutions and
innovation, we might be getting merely a glimpse of what fungi is capable of.
“Mycology is still a whole new
field of research, we’re still finding more questions and still really don’t
know where it’s going to go, which makes it really exciting,” said Travaglini.
Image sources: Vice UK/Mazda & Pearson Prentice Hall
The B.C. government is protecting 54 of its biggest trees, each with a one-hectare grove around it to act as a buffer zone.
The chosen trees are outside of parks and protected areas around the province, including Engelmann spruce in the North Okanagan, coastal Douglas fir in the Capital Regional District and Greater Vancouver, western red cedar and sitka spruce in the Alberni-Clayoquot Regional District and interior Douglas fir in the Cariboo, Columbia-Shuswap and Thompson-Nicola Regional Districts.
The list includes three Pacific yew trees in Greater Vancouver and 14 sitka spruce in the Skeena-Queen Charlotte Regional District.
Forests Minister Doug Donaldson said the initial preservation is the start of a larger program to preserve old-growth forests, more than half of which are already protected on the B.C. coast. The 54 trees were selected from the University of B.C.’s big tree registry, which lists 347 trees that are on either private or Crown land and could be harvested under current regulations.
The Slumber Party Massacre will be re-released on Blu-ray in Steelbook packaging on January 21, 2020 via Scream Factory. It features new artwork by Laz Marquez.
Shout Factory has launched pre-orders for an exclusive, limited edition set that includes a Russ Thorn 8" clothed action figure by NECA and a 28.5x16.5 lithograph featuring Marquez’s art. Limited to 2,000, it costs $59.99.
From producer Roger Corman, the 1982 slasher is directed by Amy Holden Jones (writer of Mystic Pizza and Beethoven). Michelle Michaels, Robin Stille, and Michael Villella star.
The Slumber Party Massacre has received a new 4K scan from the original camera negative. Special features are listed below.
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me.
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If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
