Some of you may have heard about Monarch butterflies being added to the Threatened species list in the US and be planning to immediately rush out in spring and buy all the milkweed you can manage to do your part and help the species.
And that's fantastic!! Starting a pollinator garden and/or encouraging people and businesses around you to do the same is an excellent way to help not just Monarchs but many other threatened and at-risk pollinator species!
However.
Please please PLEASE do not obtain Tropical Milkweed for this purpose!
Tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica)--also commonly known as bloodflower, Mexican butterflyweed, and scarlet milkweed--will likely be the first species of milkweed you find for sale at most nurseries. It'll be fairly cheap, too, and it grows and propagates so easily you'll just want to grab it! But do not do that!
Tropical milkweed can cause a host of issues that can ultimately harm the butterflies you're trying to help, such as--
Harboring a protozoan parasite called OE (which has been linked to lower migration success, reductions in body mass, lifespan, mating success, and flight ability) for long periods of time
Remaining alive for longer periods, encouraging breeding during migration time/overwintering time as well as keeping monarchs in an area until a hard freeze wherein which they die
Actually becoming toxic to monarch caterpillars when exposed to warmer temperatures associated with climate change
However--do not be discouraged!! There are over 100 species of milkweed native to the United States, and plenty of resources on which are native to your state specifically! From there, you can find the nurseries dedicated to selling native milkweeds, or buy/trade for/collect seeds to grow them yourself!!
The world of native milkweeds is vast and enchanting, and I'm sure you'll soon find a favorite species native to your area that suits your growing space! There's tons of amazing options--whether you choose the beautiful pink vanilla-smelling swamp milkweed, the sophisticated redring milkweed, the elusive purple milkweed, the alluring green antelopehorn milkweed, or the charming heartleaf milkweed, or even something I didn't list!
And there's tons of resources and lots of people willing to help you on your native milkweed journey! Like me! Feel free to shoot me an ask if you have any questions!
Just. PLEASE. Leave the tropical milkweed alone. Stay away.
TLDR: Start a pollinator garden to help the monarchs! Just don't plant tropical milkweed. There's hundreds of other milkweeds to grow instead!
"It took me TWO years to finish this sketch book!" Well that's cuz you're not fuckin sketching. Those are fully painted pieces dawg that's a renderedbook. I've gone through four sketchbooks in my off time this year alone I just draw stupid faces and shit for fun. pussy up like the rest of us and start drawing stick figures with guns
the idea of protists is really funny. Ah yes, the kingdoms of life: Animals, Plants, Fungi, and Don't worry about it:)
the most depressing part of winter is that there are no little bug friends on campus
comic done for a project assignment a few years back!
There’s a bunch of right-wing people posting memes about “”DOGE”” making the government more efficient by removing funding from “”dumb bug researchers”” and I am now realizing how little the average person knows about entomology and its importance
Excuse me while I get sad .
Fate spins along as it should.
“Ages ago the divine touched the real and your living form is the real reaching back, hand in hand, two dancers twirling in the stars forever.”
So here’s my thought, because I don’t think the Archheart is wholly wrong about the gods needing to leave, but I think, as in all things, there’s nuance to that solution. Specifically, I don’t think all of them leaving at once is the best option.
I think the Archheart and whoever the second god is that wants to leave need to take the plunge and go off on their own. Because their argument hinges on this notion that mortaldom cannot grow with them still there, but by refusing to leave without the whole of their family beside them, they too are refusing to grow. To go off on their own and explore the cosmos for themselves. They are waffling on the choice of sticking with their family as they always have or leaving the home they found and made together, just as many of their siblings have waffled on their children VS their siblings. But the thing is, they (the Archheart plus one) know they want the latter choice—leaving—more than they want to stay (and as such stick w the family), so they want to force their family’s hand so they come with and they (Archheart plus one) can get their cake and eat it too.
Which is understandable! With all they’ve been through, all the family they’ve already lost, it makes sense that they don’t want to leave anyone else behind! But in order for them to grow, they need to. And I think, with time, if the Archheart and their fellow did leave, others would follow. Would see that the choice wasn’t as calamitous (heh) as they once feared it might be. Some would stay, because the world needs its constants—the sun, death, hope, nature—and because they care for their children too deeply to stray too far and that would be okay.
Staying close may well be as suffocating as the Archheart believes it to be, but then surely the inverse—severing that tie completely by all abandoning Exandria at once—must be just as harmful. There has to be balance; some stay, some go. Perhaps one day some even come back to visit. But the gods—the Archheart, their fellow, the rest—need to realize they can survive without each other too, just as they want to show mortals they can survive without them. They’re the same, after all.