Dr. Wildlife
@drwildlife
Zoologist & digital storyteller in NYC. I’ll teach you about deep-sea creatures while we’re raving at 2 a.m. He/Him. ❓️ @altanml.bsky.social | 🖤 @v4vienna.bsky.social
Indigenous Peoples managed boreal landscapes with controlled cultural burning for thousands of years - reducing fuel loads, maintaining ecosystem health, preventing the kind of catastrophic fire accumulation we are now watching play out.
First Nations make up 5% of Canada's population and roughly 42% of its wildfire evacuees. These two charts show what that looks like in practice, over 143,000 people displaced across a decade.
Wildfire smoke exposure is linked to elevated rates of respiratory illness, cardiovascular events, and premature death. Those health costs land on people with no proximity to the fires producing them.
So, let's loop back to where we are with today's new cycle - we know wildfire smoke from Canada does not stay in Canada. But, where exactly does it go? This is NASA tracking where it went in 2023.
The research is not ambiguous about the direction we are heading. In 2023, 15 million+ hectares burned in Canada, more than double the previous record and nearly seven times the historical average. Three of the last fire seasons rank among the ten worst ever recorded.
Fire also destroys the insulating moss and organic soil sitting above the permafrost. Without it, permafrost is exposed to summer heat and begins to melt, releasing additional greenhouse gases in the process. Warmer conditions drive more fire; more fire drives more melt.
When fires burn hot enough, they go past the trees and into the ancient peat and soil layers underneath, releasing centuries of stored carbon in a single season and pushing the forest from net absorber to net emitter.
A healthy boreal forest absorbs more carbon than it releases, but only if fires are spaced far enough apart for the ecosystem to recover between them. This diagram shows what happens when they aren't. The ancient soil carbon starts leaving. It doesn't come back.
Yet it supports over 3 billion migratory birds every breeding season, alongside woodland caribou, Canada lynx, and wolverines. It holds roughly 30% of all carbon stored in land on Earth, locked in deep soil layers and peatlands. Not the canopy. The ground.
Canada's boreal forest is the largest continuous intact forest ecosystem on Earth. Spanning 1.2 billion acres from the Yukon to Newfoundland, it is larger than the Amazon and represents 25% of the world's remaining untouched primary forest. Most people have never thought about it once.
Over 800 wildfires are burning across Canada right now. Canada also holds more than a quarter of the world's boreal forest and is warming at twice the global average rate. The smoke is the part getting attention. Here is everything else. 🧵
Now arriving at ALT/ANML station... Anthrocon Edition 🖤 New clack fans, new shirts, and a BRAND NEW ITEM... electric eel pashmina! ⚡️
Spent the afternoon cutting custom shirt wraps for the new ALT/ANML drop debuting at Anthrocon! ✨️
This is what a humpback whale sounds like after a meal, visualized in TouchDesigner. Recorded in Monterey Bay right as they surfaced from deep feeding dives on sardines - the "eeee" calls you're hearing are field recordings taken by Thomas Kieckhefer.
babe wake up one of the worst people you know filmed themselves committing a felony against a federally protected animal and streamed it on the internet for clout.
A federal appeals court ruled last week that blocking trans adults from healthcare is constitutional because states have a legitimate interest in "encouraging citizens to appreciate their sex." I'm exhausted and furious and you should know this is happening.
the mantis shrimp has 16 types of color receptors. humans have 3. we see roughly 10 million colors and think that's impressive. the mantis shrimp is sitting there processing a visual reality so hyperchromatic that scientists genuinely aren't sure what it's like to be one. #addOcean
They followed what they loved into the places the science world told them they didn't belong - and they rewrote everything. That's what happens when you refuse to accept the world as it is handed to you - and change it anyway. The planet is better for it🖤
Dian Fossey (1932-1985) Told she was too emotionally attached to her subjects. Spent two decades in Rwanda documenting mountain gorilla behavior anyway. She was murdered in 1985, almost certainly for her anti-poaching work. ~250 mountain gorillas in the 1980s. Over 1,000 today.
Rachel Carson (1907–1964) Published Silent Spring in 1962. The chemical industry spent millions trying to discredit her - called her unscientific, emotional, a spinster. DDT was banned in the US ten years later. The modern environmental movement has her work at its foundation.
Eugenie Clark (1922-2015) They said sharks were mindless - no learning, no memory recall. She proved that false. Aquariums still use her training theories today. She also founded what became the Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium - still producing marine research decades later.