gaynaturalistghost

[gaynaturalistghost]

As my dear friend put it, “it’s about the yearning”. Sometimes you just gotta draw your very first dnd character Amma and she’s gotta be sad. Idk I don’t make the rules.

#amma #my dnd character #my dnd oc #dnd warlock #dnd art #dnd commission #dnd #art #artists on tumblr #oc art #character design #illustration #dnd character art #sapphic art #sapphic #it’s about the yearning

[gaynaturalistghost]

2nd attempt at Pediastrum! I’m liking this one a lot better so far. The cell walls are done with a split-stich, which I think looks really cool. It’s fairly easy as I’m learning new stitches.

#phycology #green algae #pediastrum #freshwater algae #fiber art #fiber arts #embroidery #scientists that do art #artists on tumblr

[gaynaturalistghost]

Something for my old dnd character Cairn, a kalashtar with tattoos that moved and a penchant for self-sacrifice.

#animatic #animation #kalashtar #dnd animation #dnd animatic #cairn #dnd #my dnd character #dnd character #art #artists on tumblr #illustration #character design #dnd art

[gaynaturalistghost]

My paleobotanist dnd character Cyphe! She has a nettle goat she summoned this session and I gave her some orchid creatures based on Dracula simia, a species of orchid that have flowers that look remarkably like monkey faces. She’s so smiley and cute!!!

#cyphelium evernia minarum nephrite #cyphe #d&d #dnd character art #my dnd character #art #artists on tumblr #illustration #character design #botanical creatures #botanist #dnd art #dnd #earth genasi

[gaynaturalistghost]

Absolutely frothing at the mouth about the Duke herbarium. To move all 800,000 specimens in 3 years would mean shipping 730 A Day ON ICE at a specific temp! and that’s assuming you can find herbaria that can take a significant amount of samples! You have to have special paperwork between each herbarium just to send duplicates never mind rare or extinct plants or the specimens an entire species is based on

There are about 3,000 herbaria GLOBALLY. Every herbarium IN THE WORLD would have to take 266+ specimens. We aren’t talking little pieces of paper it’s thick archival cardstock you have to carry with both arms for the plants

That’s several shelves. For lichens and moss that will include rocks, for fungi they have cardboard boxes for each.

When I was just repackaging mosses I’d be lucky if I got 30 documented sorted transferred and put away in 3-4 hrs.

Some of their collections are over a hundred years old I would hate to TOUCH one of those let alone ship it

Screaming crying throwing chairs etc

#ghost speaks

[gaynaturalistghost]

after barely a day of my poll being up it seems like so many people know about and really love natural history collections which makes my heart sing!! i would love for my fellow natural history nerds to rise up and sign this petition to protect one!!

duke university is CLOSING its herbarium which holds over 800,000 plant/fungus/algae specimens including 2,000 types spanning 180 years of collection effort all across the planet. it is the second largest private university herbarium in the entire united states. this is really bad!! i will explain in short terms:

every natural history collection's purpose is to collect and maintain specimens, which are collectively supposed to be a thorough representation of biodiversity across time and space. when sampled at regular intervals at the same places, specimens can tell endless stories about changes in shape, abundance, range, genetics, and SO much more. basically, they are a big sample size to use in all manner of studies, including those that concern climate change and biodiversity loss! new species and evolutionary relationships are constantly discovered at collections even when specimens are like 100 years old. duke has recently championed itself as a global leader in biodiversity research which is honestly in jawdropping conflict with its move to close its herbarium. this herbarium not only supplies duke researchers with material but researchers all over the world. specimens have been cited in over 46,000 publications and over 13,000 since 2019 alone. we have old shit in our cabinets but the science is anything but history!

faculty and staff have 2-3 years to move the specimens elsewhere which is NOT enough time for 800,000 old dried plant/fungus specimens. this is an issue in even the BEST natural history collections at the biggest institutions but collections are pretty much always understaffed and underpaid. a university collection usually relies a lot on student labor and you know they do not have the time to be contributing to this move. to find collections that would take these specimens AND allocate the manpower and time needed to send them off is not feasible. types, especially holotypes should really NEVER be transported because they serve as the exemplar for the characteristics of the species it represents. i do not feel good about hurrying 800,000 old, fragile specimens including 2,000 types getting moved in a short amount of time by a few people. i do not want to know what will happen to the remaining specimens that don't make it out in time.

this sets a really dangerous precedent for other university collections across the world. this is not a random state school, this is duke university, which is practically an ivy league. if they close such a prominent and respected collection just because they're not 260% maximizing their profits, it may let other greedy university admins know they can get away with the same. i've only been in the professional collections world for a short time but shutting down a collection let alone one as big as duke's is almost UNHEARD of. i haven't seen scientists band together so strongly and quickly over an issue (i'm in an ENTOMOLOGY collections listserv and someone advocated for emailing duke admin against this decision), probably because they can all agree on how strongly this could impact climate and biodiversity research and policymaking down the road.

tl;dr if duke herbarium really closes, we would be losing a vital hub for ongoing and future research that helps us understand how our world is changing through the dynamics of our plants and their allies. other institutions might see this and follow suit with their own collections.

#this is huge!!! #as someone who’s worked in an herbarium for more than a year this is so horrible #herbarium collections include rare and extinct species #they are essential for conservation and genetic sequencing #think about the medicinal properties of plants #this is also how we document the ranges of species and where they are disappearing or migrating #anyway sign this if you can #taking back the herbarium tag #herbarium #conservation #climate change #signal boost

[gaynaturalistghost]

I ripped my pants on a big quartzite boulder at my field site and finally mended them. I picked Pediastrum, a green algae colony that was super plentiful there. The blue ones are Aphanothece I think that I’ve also seen there : )

It’s like.. the 3rd thing I’ve ever embroidered so I’m not particularly happy with it but it was fun

#ghost speaks #pediastrum #aphanothece #plankton #phycology #embroidery

[gaynaturalistghost]

Some botany and mycology valentines! At the last minute lol.

Always love seeing @neat-deadandlive-things ‘s valentines and thought I’d contribute!

#valentine #valentines day #valentines #funny valentine #botany shitposts #mycology #ascus

[gaynaturalistghost]

I’m really enjoying The Magnus Protocol so far!

#tmagp #tmagp fanart #the magnus protocol #gwen bouchard #tmagp sam #tmagp gwen #tmagp Alice #tmagp colin #podcast fanart #artists on tumblr #art #illustration #character design

[gaynaturalistghost]

A fun commission of a token for Roll 20 I got to do! It’s been a while since I drew the moon, takes me back to my astronomy project to see how well I could draw the moon in different phases then overlaid a map at the end to see how well I got the craters and maria.

#dnd commission #comission #open art commissions #rpg commission #roll 20 token #art #artists on tumblr #dnd #dnd art

[gaynaturalistghost]

I had a great time in the maze!

Image source

i'm making a brand new, unbearable wizard quiz

#wizard #wizards is an animal #uquiz #ghost speaks

[gaynaturalistghost]

You can ask a lichenologist this and get the same answer

i asked an angel what the deal with lichen was and they got really skittish and told me they could give me the answer to anything in the universe but to please not ask them about the lichen

#there’s AT LEAST 3 main partners #algae +/- cyanobacteria #basidiomycete yeasts #and the ascomycete(s) that make up most of the body #every time a lichen gets sequenced it adds a new symbiont #I’m not super up to date #on the bacteria and stuff #but yeah I talked to one of the big lichenologist guys and he hates getting that question #love talking about lichens #hate defining them #ghost speaks

[gaynaturalistghost]

There is a cool answer to this, basically the yeast cells will be fine metabolism-wise, instead of aerobic (with oxygen) fermentation they can switch to anaerobic fermentation. The thing is they will start to get… weird. The yeast cells will ‘degenerate into bizarre forms’.

Fermentation can take place in the gooey protoplasm of the cell but when oxygen is present other reactions happen in the mitochondria and structures are formed that actually give the cells structure and shape. The same thing can happen with cancer cells, our own cells can have their mitochondria damaged and start to produce energy by fermentation but they have to grow hundreds of times faster to keep making as much ATP as healthy cells and their structure gets fucked.

This is talked about more eloquently in the paper I used: Warburg, O. (1956). On the Origin of Cancer Cells. Science, 123(3191), 309–314. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1750066

Where this takes a turn is in evolutionary history, mitochondria aren’t just the “powerhouses of the cell”. They make special molecules that are used for apoptosis, programmed cell death. When early eukaryote predators were eating ‘prey’ bacteria that would become mitochondria, both were trying to kill each other. Mitochondria with those cell-killing factors and the eukaryotes by suppressing the mitochondria’s metabolism. If mitochondria work too quickly, cells age and die, too little and you get cellular body horror.

This is from Kaczanowski et al.’s really interesting paper I’ve cited below.

Kaczanowski, S., Klim, J., & Zielenkiewicz, U. (2018). An apoptotic and endosymbiotic explanation of the warburg and the inverse warburg hypothesis. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 19(10), 3100. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms19103100 https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms191031

The stories that played out billions of years ago are still told in the biochemistry of our cells today.

And mitochondria are full of spite.

Sometimes describing things to my grandparents is like. You ask. Hypothetically. What would happen if you put activated yeast in an airtight container. And my grandmother asks. What recipe is that for? And we’re like no this is a thought experiment. Maybe a real experiment. Perhaps we could seal tight the pressure cooker and just not plug it in to see what would happen. And then my grandfather asks what kind of bread we’re making. And we’re like no we’re thinking through a hypothetical experiment with an unplugged pressure cooker. And then my grandmother asks why you’d make bread in a pressure cooker. And we say no for the millionth time we’re just wondering what happens to yeast if you put it in an airtight container. Do you think they’d just run out of oxygen and die? We could probably look this up somewhere. And then they ask where we found this recipe and why it’s in a pressure cooker and we say no it’s not a recipe in fact what we’re considering could create botulism or something and then they ask what has botulism and we’re like there is no botulism we’re considering the possibility of it if we were to do this hypothetical experiment. And then they ask. What experiment? I thought this was a recipe. And then we say no it’s not a recipe we’re talking about performing bad science in our garage with yeast and a pressure cooker and then they ask why would you put yeast in a pressure cooker

#ghost speaks #mycology #cancer #the Warburg hypothesis #endosymbiosis #symbiosis #microbiology #mitochondria #the ​mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell #and something worse.

[gaynaturalistghost]

A Circle of Spores Druid commission I’m very proud of! I’ve never done a kobold before so that took a lot of experimentation, which was worth it to get to shove ~20 species of mushrooms in. (They are not to scale or growing on the right substrates) species with an ‘x’ are toxic and species with a ‘☑️’ are edible.

I don’t do research on basidiomycetes (most mushrooms) except yeasts, but I do appreciate them from afar. I’m an ascomycete person.

#circle of spores #druid art #dnd character art #dnd commission #kobold #mycology in fiction #comission #open art commissions #fungi #basidiomycota #fungi art #character design #artists on tumblr #illustration #art #dnd art #dnd

[gaynaturalistghost]

Commission of Poison Ivy for @lushloooser, who I frequently rant to about botany. If you like my stuff you’ll probably like her writing linked here! https://archiveofourown.org/works/32299885

#poison ivy dc #pamela isley #dc #art #artists on tumblr #commission #commissions open #dc fanart #fanfic #poison ivy but she’s an actual botanist #illustration #blood cw #cw blood #cw knife

[gaynaturalistghost]

I graduated college and commissions are open!!!

In addition to the listed pieces I have been doing animation as well, pieces like these can be formatted as a gif or video and range from $40-60.

I will send you sketches and an estimate for price, and require about 1/2 before completion. Send me a message here if you are interested!

Hey naturalist do you think you'll open commissions again (wanna make sure to stash some cash away if you do) no pressure though! Have a great day :)

… I might be at some point? If I do I’ll still have a bit of a backlog but feel free to message me and if I do I’ll work my way through : )

#commissions #comission #ghost speaks #art #artists on tumblr #illustration #animation #open art commissions #dnd art #dnd

[gaynaturalistghost]

WIP!

I just got my lichen & fungi sequences ready to ship out! Wooo! There was even DNA in them from my extractions 🥲

Ivy has Virginia creeper under her skin and variegated houseplant leaves (I don’t know what kind! The pic didn’t say. If you have an idea lmk) in her hair.

#harley Quinn wears bedazzled heeleys #harley x ivy #poison ivy #poison ivy but she’s an actual botanist #dr pamela isley #pamela isley #poison ivy dc #harley quinn #Harley Quinn dc #dc #art #artists on tumblr #dc fanart