thedevitoanditsown:equagga:kaijutegu:bogleech:bogleech: A rare giant hellbender salamander f
thedevitoanditsown: equagga: kaijutegu: bogleech: bogleech: A rare giant hellbender salamander found dead because some hiker’s rock-stacking collapsed on her.I didn’t even know rock stacking was a thing until this year but there are many ways it disrupts the environment. *Ever since it caught on as a form of white hipster “meditation” there are actually so many hikers who stack rocks now as a hobby that it collectively pollutes streams with sediment that the rocks would otherwise be filtering and reduces the populations of countless organisms that grow and nest among said rocks. http://www.wideopenspaces.com/rock-stacking-natural-graffitti-ecological-impact/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/stacking-rocks-wilderness-no-good-180955880/ http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/08/25/new-graffiti-national-parks-fight-stone-stackers/ “There is merit to everyone doing some part to heal wounds to fragile riparian ecosystems that are already enduring a slow death by a thousand cuts.” Flipping over rocks at all changes their very nature. It doesn’t even matter if you put them back afterwards - when you lift up a stone that has laid among other stones and been shaped just-so by the current, if it had properties that made it appealing to stream creatures as nesting and resting places, you’ve changed them. Even scientists are moving away from flipping stones to seek out animals. Genetic sampling is the method preferred in this day and age, as filtering DNA out of the water column hurts nothing. Leave the stones be. As much as every naturalist itches to peek beneath them, and as much as every dipshit wants to stack them on top of one another, it’s not the right thing to do. This is why it’s important to think of nature as more of like, a cascading and convergence of innumerable natural “processes” because as you can see even turning over a simple rock in a river has consequences beyond just the singular act of turning over a rock. -- source link