I am everything in your DNI all at once

did it work

If you're old enough to be online then you're old enough to know how to block and filter the tag it's not my responsibility to look after you

I don't mean it in a creepy way I promise, but I feel a kinship with China, Japan and Korea i wish more people from my region shared, because...we have sister ecosystems!

It's actually amazing, there are so many plant genera that are not closely related to anything else and just have a couple living species: One (or two) from mid latitude Southeast Asia, and one from the Southeastern USA.

For example, the two living lotus species (sacred lotus and American lotus), the two living tulip tree/ Liriodendron species, the Chinese and American sweetgums (Liquidambar spp.) the Chinese and American trumpet vines (Campsis spp.) the Chinese, Japanese and American wisteria (Wisteria spp), the Chinese, Taiwan and American sassafras (Sassafras spp.) I KNOW i'm forgetting many of them because there are so many. Twins!!!!

And there's so many iconic plant groups shared in common between East Asia and SE USA. Like dogwoods, magnolias, rhododendrons, we even have our own bamboo!!!

I think a lot of how strangely familiar each ecosystem would feel to someone visiting from the other one.

And I bet there's a lot of ecological knowledge and insights we could share with each other...

Sister ecosystems...

The side effect of this, is that east Asian plants are Virulently Invasive in SE USA, and...you guessed it, SE USA plants are Virulently Invasive in east Asia.

Some of them have even become more common as invasive species than they are where they're native!

@scatteredcloud That's a great question, and the answer is that it isn't convergent evolution, they really are closely related species with a common ancestor!

That's SO much distance! How did they do it? I don't really understand it myself.

Were they once one species with a super wide distribution all around the world, and the intermediates went extinct? Did the ancestral species migrate from one area to the other when the climate was different?

When studying the genus Arundinaria (American bamboo!) I learned that Arundinaria split off from all other temperate woody bamboos about 2 million years ago. Apparently, 2 million years ago, a bamboo moved from Asia to North America, and nothing like that ever happened again...or at least if it did, the evidence went extinct.

So was there a time when bamboo stretched from sea to shining sea, all across the Beringia land bridge and everything, and the family tree was pruned by ice ages...or what???

Its really strange because a lot of these shared plant genera, are limited to warm temperate to subtropical climes, so the ice ages would have REALLY fucked their entire shit up. Arundinaria was reduced to a tiny area along the gulf coast during the last glacial maximum.

I wonder if there's a pattern, do species mainly evolve in Asia and immigrate to USA, or what...?

I do know that a lot of these shared species are relict survivors of basal angiosperm groups that split off really early from other angiosperms...don't know what that means though.

Okay so with liriodendron (tulip poplar or tulip tree) it's super cursed, there are two groups or lineages of the Chinese species and the American species is genetically intermediate between them both. I don't understand how that works.

But basically they used to be a species much more widely distributed but the ice ages obliterated them from most of their range, however they stayed alive in the two places on earth conditions were still good for them. L. tulipifera genetic diversity is way lower than the Chinese species, because there weren't as many suitable refugia for the trees to go during the last glaciation.

With Nelumbo (lotus), this study suggests that the two lotus species could have split from each other as late as the Pleistocene, and it's the same story, the common ancestor species used to be super widespread, but the ice age wiped out most of its range, and the plants had to recolonize from the two places they survived.

However with Campsis spp. the two species are estimated to have diverged 24.4 MILLION years ago which is. Insane.

The two sassafras species are said to have diverged 13-17 million years ago,

According to this article the Wisterias diverged approx 13.4 million years ago, with the American one actually traveling from Asia to America, rather than a more broadly distributed population being interrupted.

Okay okay now I'm wondering if China has any weird species with extinct American relatives.

hhey. hey. there are two whole species of alligator in the entire world.

one of them you should already be pretty familiar with

but guess where the other one is!

go on,

guess

“Okay here’s the list of chores I want to get done today” I tell myself before having sudden full body fatigue from seemingly nothing

ever since i was a little girl i knew i wanted to be a nervous young man

god this website used to be dope

Can you say something about fat people that doesn’t involve the phrase “tummy squish” or any variants thereof. Quickly

I know a couple fat guys and they're good electricians

have we tried substance abuse my liege

everyone should have a balanced diet of both good music and music that fucking sucks. it's healthy. get over it.

btw dating sucks as a concept.

meeting up with someone with the explicit goal of figuring out whether or not you want a relationship with them spoils the dynamic. it sucks. it's terrible. fall in love with your friends like normal people.

as expected this one is a hit with the autism website

I love creating fake versions of the good heavypaint brushes on firealpaca. It’s the best

You are not a leftist if you think two adults consenting to kink should be considered a crime. Idc what kink it is. The perpetuation of shame around sex is inherently conservative. The criminalization of sex that you don't like or understand or that you think is "wrong" or "immoral" is inherently conservative. You cannot actually believe in the freedom of all marginalized people if you would enact oppressive systems on any group that you dislike. Like this should be common sense but y'all are so far up your own asses...