05/09/2020 Diatoms build themselves shells of iridescent silica, pretty much the same stuff opals ar
05/09/2020 Diatoms build themselves shells of iridescent silica, pretty much the same stuff opals are made out of. A little under half earth’s oxygen is made by microscopic living opals floating in every ocean, river, pond, and puddle. Every hidden place is full of rainbows.Which is how you can just buy convenient buckets of tiny opals at the feed store. The chickens have got bird lice again, so we got some diatom corpses and sprinkled them on the chickens’ feathery butts. The opal shards stab the lice to death. All the vast wide world of a chicken butt becomes a storm of rainbowed knives and doom.We made the chickens a Bathhouse Of Prismatc Doom by putting a bunch of sand and diatom corpses in a dog crate so they could stay louse-free. Unfortunately, they much prefer lounging about smugly on top of their Bathhouse of Prismatic Doom to actually bathing in it, so we’ll have to opalize their butts again sometime.(Antarctic diatom photo from Professor Gordon T Taylor, NOAA) -- source link
#diatoms#poultry lice#chicken