Discussion Thread

Second

👆hasn’t made it yet👇

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic succ

You ever do something that sounds great on paper, but ends being terrible in reality

John Hoeven mustache ranking?

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first

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Me and who

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The mostly fallen ecosystem of the longleaf pine savanna of the American Southeast below the fall line of the Piedmont is painful to consider. Unlike the vanished mammoth steppe that relied on mammoths to destroy the encroaching trees that now make up the low biodiversity taiga forests of ex. Siberia, in the Southeast the landscape was kept from becoming densely forested by the dominant plants themselves. The longleaf pine grows slowly at first while it establishes its deep roots and can’t abide shade, but it is insanely fire resistant by thickly covering itself with a dense covering of protective pine needles while young and through thick bark when it ages. As an adult it freely dumps flammable pine needles around, and it’s paired with long grasses that dig deep roots and a lot of surface area up top. Then an errant bolt of lightning would easily torch the area and incinerate encroaching trees so they would never grow up to hog the sun, after which they and many other fast growing plants would have a growth bonanza that would stimulate local wildlife to boom (in the few remaining private patches of longleaf pine this strategy is used to recreationally promote quail for hunting as they are by far more abundant with loose pine savannas managed with fire). And since these fires happened all the time they were relatively low impact as fuel accumulation wouldn’t become particularly high.
Local critters have strategies for dealing with this like the gopher tortoise that digs vast underground tunnels to provide shelter and almost every other small mammal that will say its free real estate and move into those burrows in a fire.

Back in the day bison, mountain lions and red wolves prowled the savanna, and gregarious colonies of the Carolina Parakeet gathered in the hundreds – particularly around their wounded or dying members for protection, a behavior that later made them easy to shoot. Going back even further, you would have seen massive ground sloths.

Now the longleaf pine has been mass cleared for get rich quick schemes and fragmented to oblivion, and with fire suppression we’re instead getting dense impassable forests of ex. sweetgum and water oak or nowadays the likes of a giant mass of kudzu that will one day light up into a raging inferno. Pines were planted back, but quick growing ones like Loblolly that are packed densely enough to shade out the understory and that aren’t as resistant to the elements.

[Mostly I’m sad I can’t see these adorable fellows](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/AudubonCarolinaParakeet2.jpg)

don’t stop believin