Mimosa pudica (from Latin: pudica “shy, bashful or shrinking”; also called sensitive plant and the touch-me-not), is a creeping annual or perennial herb often grown for its curiosity value: the compound leaves fold inward and droop when touched or shaken, re-opening minutes later. The species is native to South America and Central America, but is now a pantropical weed.
(Source: jaidefinichon, via king-owl)
Turritopsis nutricula jellyfish
This species of jellyfish might be the only animal in the world to have truly discovered the fountain of youth. Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span, making it immortal. Because they are able to bypass death, the number of individuals is spiking. “We are looking at a worldwide silent invasion,” says Dr. Maria Miglietta of the Smithsonian Tropical Marine Institute.
(Source: icanmakeyouhate, via rabichan)
Endangered Siberian tigers try to reach for a wild bird that was tossed in by the game ranger and flew out of their reach at the Harbin Tiger Park in Harbin, China.
Photo by Ng Han Guan-AP (via Day in photos) :)
(via pricklylegs)
Petrified Lightning: Natural glass formed by lightning strikes is called fulgurite. It is created when a lightning strike hits a sandbank, blowing a super-heated hole right through it. This quickly cools into a beautiful glass. The name comes from Latin fulgur, or lightning.
(Image credit to flickr, Carion Mineraux, and Nature. Thanks Grandma.)
(via mothernaturenetwork)
“Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying the ‘the game belongs to the people.’ So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.”
~Theodore Roosevelt, 1916
