The Angel Oak is a very old Southern live oak near Charleston, South Carolina, thought to be around 400–500 years old.
Its massive canopy spreads over 17,000 square feet, some of its branches have touched the ground and grown roots
Reminder that we live on a planet where trees warn each other of danger through a fungal network. Where octopuses dream
Where elephants return to the bones of the deceased and stand over them in silence. Where bees use dance to communicate where to fly and where the ftower is. Where crows remember the faces of people who were cruel to them and pass this memory to their children. Where ants build cities. Where cats purr at a frequency that accelerates the healing of bones. Where, after a forest fire, the first thing the earth does is grow flowers.
There are about 18,000 species of wasps in North America. Roughly 20 of them can hurt you.
The wasps people fear are all from one family: Vespidae. They make up less than 1% of wasp species on the continent. They build the visible nests, they defend them aggressively, and they're the ones you remember from a bad encounter.
The other 99% live solitary lives and ignore humans entirely. Many can't sting at all. Many more have stingers but never use them on people because they don't have a nest to defend.
What they do instead is hunt other insects. A single mud dauber stocks her nest with paralyzed spiders, including widows and recluses. A braconid wasp lays eggs in tomato hornworms. An ichneumon wasp parasitizes wood-boring beetles that kill ash trees. A cuckoo wasp infiltrates the nests of other wasps and bees. Some species control aphids; others control caterpillars, beetle grubs, or flies.
Most agricultural pest insects in North America are controlled, in part, by parasitic wasps that almost no human ever sees. There are over 25,000 species of ichneumon wasps alone, and they keep entire orders of insects in check.
The five or so wasp species that ruin a picnic in late August are real. The 17,995 species that are running the pest control infrastructure of an entire continent get almost none.
@BretDevereaux Any modern Great Man theory should obviously include Jonas Salk for releasing a widely available polio vaccine and banishing a common disease from any part of the world with enough infrastructure to deploy it. Failure to do so is an error.
for all you know, this could be your last summer.
as homer wrote, you will never be lovelier than you are right now. so tell her she has a pretty smile. get lean or become a unit. find wonder in boarding the airplane. drink more coffee than you need. walk on the beach until your feet hurt. write your girlfriend a note on a tuesday. waste money because its not all about retirement. pull over at the lookout. ask the uber driver about his life. tell the woman in the elevator you like her shoes and mean it. call your mother. ask the waiter his favorite thing on the menu and order that.
theres so much life in the slow moments, and you sprint past it chasing the next thing. but at any time, in any situation, you can find the good. smile. be happy. recognize it for a one of one life experience. what good is walking around a curmudgeon when tomorrow could be curtains.
for heavens sake, flirt with the world.