Alishan Forest | ©Weisi Guo (Yushan National Park, Taiwan)
People often think of fire as a destructive force, and it can be. But fire also rejuvenates the land. Many grasses have evolved root systems that survive fires so they can be renewed, and some trees and other plants have seeds that only germinate after a fire has come through. Plus fires clean out old dead wood and other debris, making it easier for fresh plant life to grow.
It’s like a picture of the tide coming in, somewhere in the Elemental Chaos.
(via nirdian)
Source: eisflan
photos by matt smith from the Illawarra coast in new south wales of bluebottles, violet snails and blue dragons.
despite its resemblance to the jellyfish, the bluebottle is more closely related to coral. known as a zooid, the bluebottle (or portugese man of war) is a colonial animal composed of many highly specialized and physiologically integrated individual organisms incapable of independent survival.
the blue dragon — a type of nudibranch, here no larger than a thumbnail, with its own potent sting — is able to eat the nematocysts (stinging cells) of the bluebottle without discharging them and internally relocate them to the tips of each one of the fingers you can see in the pictures.
for their part, the violet snails also feed on the bluebottles.
notes matt, “despite their potentially dangerous sting, the bluebottle is an amazingly beautiful creature. with strong winds, hundreds of these cnidaria are blown into the bays around my home town and trapped overnight.”
this allows him to capture the above shots, which he creates with use of a fluorescent tube in his strobe light and a homemade waterproof lens dome.
(via monere-lluvia)
Source: nubbsgalore
Only a sheet of ice protects you from falling 1000 feet down this Abyss
Photographer Aaron Huey, who is on assignment for National Geographic, recently shared a picture of a frighteningly deep hole on the Lower Ruth Glacier. The only thing stopping people from plummeting down the 1000 feet drop into the ground is a sheet of ice. One crack, though.
Huey wrote:
Staring down what could be a 1,000ft deep worm hole through the blue ice of the Lower #RuthGlacier. I was never afraid of the ones full of water, they’d just be cold, but some had no water and it was easy to imagine a long slide to an icy death.
(via monere-lluvia)
Source: astrodidact
Source: 500px.com
Source: woodendreams
Source: wowtastic-nature
