Ooh ooh ooh! This looks like an excellent excuse valid reason to talk about one of my favorite topics, matriarch trees!
So, when you see trees in a forest, they stick up outta the ground, some distance from each other, and you’re like ‘these are unconnected critters,’ right? But! The thing is! Just like the trees in the picture are connected above-ground, trees in a forest are normally connected below-ground. There’s this whole complicated thing involving a symbiotic relationship with fungi, but we’re gonna simplify it to this: trees connect to each other through their root systems.
And they use it to share resources, across the whole forest.
If there’s a tree over here growing in soil with a lot of, like, potassium, they’ll pull up more potassium than they need, and send it out through the root system to other trees that are living where there isn’t much potassium.
And one of the coolest things? Trees communicate their needs. If a tree is sick or damaged or starving, they send chemical messages out through the root system that tell the other trees to send them more food and tree-equivalent-of-immune-system.
Trees will share so much of their resources, they’ll even keep trees alive that are almost entirely dependent. Like this tree! The tree above is getting some energy from its leaves, but no other nutrition of its own. And it wasn’t able to link up to the shared root system. So the other tree reached out and hooked up to it directly, feeding it all of the nutrients it needed!
You see it more commonly the other way around: in an old-growth forest, where the roots are well-established, you can find stumps where a tree was cut down a century ago… but if you scrape the stump it’s still green wood. The tree’s still alive, without a single leaf. Because all the other trees in the forest are feeding it.
I promised to talk about matriarch trees, so here’s where we get to them.
In a very old forest, you have very old trees. You have some trees that are so very, very old, their own roots cover entire regions of the forest. Their leaves reach up to the sky over everyone else. And after so long, they’ve developed to where they can take in way more resources than they need.
So what do they do?
They feed baby trees.
Baby saplings in an old forest can’t reach up to the sun. There’s no light down there. And their roots are too small and shallow to dig down to the nutrients they need. So the matriarch tree will draw energy from its towering canopy, and nutrients from its massive, ancient roots, and feed them to the little trees that are too small to feed themselves. For anything she can’t get on her own, she’ll act as a central hub, taking in spare resources from the rest of the forest and giving them to the little ones.
And one of the best parts - she won’t just do it for her own species. She’ll connect to all kinds of trees, because they’re all necessary for the ecosystem to work. She’ll adopt the whole forest’s children.
Sometimes in forests you’ll find a spot where there are a lot of small trees in an open space around an old, fallen tree. People generally assume they could find more light there, or maybe the soil’s more fertile from the decomposition.
But no.
They’re her children, and she’s spent centuries keeping the whole forest alive.
I once went to a concert with a friend (I don’t remember the band, she dragged me along) when I was 16. They were starting a wall of death and this guy who was flirting with me decides it would be funny to pull my top down, exposing my breasts, then throw me in the middle of this wall of death right as it’s about to meet. When I stumble in the middle and hit the wall someone screamed “STOP! EXPOSED GIRL!” and I thought they were all going to oggle at me. Instead, one guy quickly helped me cover up, three more helped me to my feet, and another asked who did that. When I pointed out the guy, two of them looked at him, me, each other, then nodded and punched the guy in the face before forcing him into the wall that was about to form again.
Metal men are gentlemenly as shit.
This fucking this^^^
I’ve always loved this.
I went to my first concert a few months ago and there were these really tall men with black vest tops and tattoos and piercings surrounding us screaming loudly when the music started playing, but then we realised this kid in the crowd had lost his mum so they tried to comfort him and when he started crying they asked him his name and he shakily sobbed “Eliot” at which point they lifted him in the air onto the shoulder’s and shouted at the top of their lungs “ELIOT’S MUM, ELIOT IS LOOKING FOR YOU. EXCUSE ME HAS ANYONE SEEN ELIOT’S MUM!!!” at which point Eliot started giggling between sobs until he finally found his mum while in the air.
Seriously, I have felt safer in groups of death metal dudes than in the group of the preppiest preps that ever prepped.
Metal guys are one big family. Simple as that.
I remember seeing this for the first time like a year ago and not once have I seen it and not reblogged it because this is just amazing.
My old coworker was one of those guys. Big, bearded, played in a hardcore metal band. One day another coworker’s laptop was stolen from the breakroom, so metal-head bought him a brand new one.
That guy was really a huge teddy bear.
My friend is tiny and she was at a concert when she was 15 or something and they were about to do a wall of death and she was right at the front. She started to realise this was not going to end well for her, but then this massive guy next to her picked her up and put her on his shoulders just as it began. After when she asked why, he said “if I didn’t pick you up you would have been crushed.” Metal men are nicer than most.
I think the rules for metal dudes are universal. 1. Look out for smaller people that could be hurt and help them. 2. If someone falls, help them up. 3. If you see anyone being a dick fucking pulverise them
If demons looked like demons Evil would be quite rare. It’s the demons dressed as angels For which we must beware.
I found this article about Matelotage and it was so prevalent on the island of Tortuga that the French governor shipped 2,000 Parisian prostitutes there to try and keep the men from pairing up with each other. But I know from other historical sources that f/f relationships were prevalent among prostitutes
I mean don’t get me wrong the loud ones are great too but there is something so poetic about the quiet ones.
Like when a kid hides a pride flag in their room or paints their stuff the colors because they know if its not rainbow their parents won’t know what it means.
or when someone hides a binder in their backpack to change into and out of at school, “plus school takes up most of the time I can bind anyway”
The kids that are never deadnamed at school but in front of their family their classmates will never betray them.
The kids that have secret blogs
the kids that have secret lives
because you simply cant live in a world without some of you in it.
Kids that all flock to the one with supportive parents
the kids that sneak out to pride festivals with their friends
the kids that are secretly themselves
the kids that are secretly heroes
and those secret silent rebellions
are fantastic.
So please
Please
keep it up.
The world is so much better with you in it.
I needed this today. Thank you
Is it…possible to be both? Like, open about yourself but because of the backlash, despite being open, you just sound open, but don’t look it?
