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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Pterostylis pedunculata (maroon hood), Erskine Falls, Otways (leaves speckled with silt) 🌱🧪

Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Bogong Moths are deservedly getting all the attention but we are in serious Utetheisa pulchelloides season – the heliotrope moth – with clouds of white moths rising from the ground everywhere as we walk along in the bush (this photo is not mine, of these flighty fellas) 🧪

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Recursive self improvement likely outcomes #73 pbfcomics.com/wp-content/u...

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

*Of course* it was 'unlawful' in any meaningful sense; *of course* it was a crime against humanity,; *of course* Britain is obliged to provide restitution www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-i...

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Amidst the world's troubles it is soothing to split firewood and feed longicorn beetle larvae to the old chook

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Easy quiz. In what part of Australia was this photo taken? 🧪🌱

The photo shows a tree with very distinctive bark

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

With no cold offshore upwelling system, the so-called mediterranean climate of southwestern Australia can just be broken by a whimsical tropical cyclone. It's almost as if ex-TC Narelle will track the warm Leeuwin Current down the WA coast 🧪

Forecast synoptic charts showing ex-tropical cyclone Narelle abruptly turning left and potentially delivering >100mm of rain to southwest Australia, over the next 3 or 4 days

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

More mottled leaves in New Zealand forests. This is a flora that pretends to be suffering from lime chlorosis

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Why the conspiracy of silence about mottled leaves in the New Zealand flora

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Yep, LLMs make unbridled demands on power/water & are mega-plagiarism; but it's also useful to monitor where this is going. I have to admit to being surprised by ChatGPT's ability to generate appropriate criteria for evaluating plausible botanical source taxa for fossil 'Prunus' in lowland Borneo

an extract from a 'conversation' with ChatGPT 5.1 about plausible botanical source genera for a lowland Borneo fossil pollen type identified in a published fossil pollen publication as "Prunus". The final sentence is the most impressive/disturbing, the unprompted 'observation' that introuced taxa needn't be considered unless the sediment is geologically very young

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

I would like to see a curve of the proportion of each regional flora occupied by woody taxa with opposite-decussate leaves 🧪🌿

A Beaufortia species from southwest Western Australia, with oppposite-decussate leaves (thanks to Susan Hulbert for the excellent FB photo)

Codia albifrons, New Caledonia (thanks to https://www.crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt.com/flora-of-new-caledonia)

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

Die back and apparent recent mortality of Eucalyptus macrorhyncha (red stringybark) in the Mullum Mullum valley, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 🧪🌿.

several individual Eucalyptus macrorhyncha trees with crown dieback

a Eucalyptus macrorhyncha tree that appears to have recently died, retaining fine twigs but leafless

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

by contrast, Decalobanthus peltatus (Convolvulaceae) belongs to a small (~20 spp) and recent Malesian/inner Pacific radiation of fast-growing vines. It probably arrived in Australia within the past million years or so

Decalobanthus peltatus, in cyclone-damaged patch of the Daintree rainforest, northeastern Queensland Wet Tropics

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

the cycad Bowenia spectabilis (Zamiaceae), Daintree rainforest, Queensland Wet Tropics. Bowenia has been kicking around Australia since at least the late Cretaceous 🧪🌿

a specimen of Bowenia spectabilis growing on the forest floor of Daintree rainforest, northeast Queensland

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

Decalobanthus peltatus (previously within polyphyletic Merremia) is a megatherm Convolvulaceae vine colonising cyclone-damaged Daintree rainforest (NE Queensland). Totally feral on Pacific Islands, esp where not native (no surprise). See George Staples' superb revision tinyurl.com/42dk4pe2 🌿🧪

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

With respect, your interpretation is not consistent with the text of Whewell's review of Somerville's book, even if it was Somerville's intellectual breadth that stimulated W to discuss the need for a general term for practicers of science.

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Is 'real' AGI about to take over the world? I asked #ChatGPT4.5 if it could generate an undergraduate lecture on #AMOC. No problem. Pretty credible outlines of content & detailed description of slides, all pretty accurate. But can you also *generate* the slides? What's not to love about the result

a completely fanciful, impressionistic image generated by ChatGPT 4.5 in response to my request to produce powerpoint slides associated with an undergraduate lecture on the Atlantic Overturning Circulation. The diagram implies that the LLM does not read images but sees them as visual patterns only. So, 'Greenland' straddles the south pole, and the image featuress "Sonking Greenland' and "Warm surface becomg dessy" and other delights

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Paleogene Bagelopollis verrucatus (Carroll 1999, Palynology 23:55), a fossil pollen type named for the resemblance of its pores' pseudo-annuli to a BAGEL. Nice example of disregarding Greek/Latin bound morphemes in forming scientific terms. Probably the only #Yiddish-derived palynological term! 🧪

reproduction of a monochrome micrograph plate showing fossil Bagelopollis pollen

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

but yes, you're quite right, image-generation has the highest energy demand and is the most pointless product. Hallucinatory pollen images are of no use at all, whereas an endlessly patient R coding tutor, which is an order of magnitude less energy-intensive, is extremely valuable to me

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

If instead of video we ask only for images, we could use #OpenAI's #Dall-e3. For the prompt "several tricolporate pollen grains from different families, shown in polar and equatorial views", we get this wonderful display of pasta or colonial wasp nests. #palynology 🌿🧪

an AI-generated image of "several tricolporate pollen grains from different families, shown in polar and equatorial views", but really a nicely shaded display of intricate pasta types

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

#Sora is deeply confused about many aspects of reality ("optical microscopy image of an Asteraceae pollen grain")🌿🧪

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Finally, if we ask #OpenAI's #Sora for "tricolpate pollen grains in several plant families, as seen down a light microscope", we get...what, a pile of rugulate walnuts, or #Elaeocarpus seeds?🧪🌿

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Maybe #Sora is meant to just produce fun videos for kids? This junk, in response to "tricolpate pollen grains viewed under light microscopy, in several plant families". These remind me of extinct Cretaceous Wodehousia pollen, (probably an extinct angiosperm lineage), but c'mon. #palynology 🌿🧪 1/2

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

if I give #OpenAI's #Sora a little more instruction: "several tricolporate pollen grains from different families, shown in polar and equatorial views" we get a collection of star anise fruits and, perhaps, SEM images of anisopolar pollen from non-angiosperm land-plants in a parallel universe.🌿🧪

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

oh dear, this is #OpenAI's #Sora's response to "several tricolporate pollen grains shown in polar and equatorial views". These do look a *little* like tiny bony fruits, but somehow it does not understand what "tri" might signify? #palynology #pollen 🧪🌿

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Evidently, #OpenAI's #Sora just hasn't stored meaningful connections between the components of the phrase "triaperturate pollen" and appropriate visual information. Here are two videos I prescribed as "triaperturate pollen grains slowly rotating" #palynology🧪🌿 1/2

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

There really *was* an *old* Phytologist. *New* Phytologist aimed to be accessible not only to research botanists, but to school teachers, etc. 🧪🌾

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Scented Boronia anemonifolia (Rutaceae), in coastal woodland, Freycinet National Park, eastern Tasmania 🧪🌾

A photo of a Tasmanian shrub, Boronia anemonifolia , with flower and leaf detail

A photo of a Tasmanian shrub, Boronia anemonifolia, showing the understory shrub aspect

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

pages of SWAFR flowers, by pollination strategy (apparently open access) www.publish.csiro.au/bt/Fulltext/... e.g, who knew there was so much buzz-pollination 2/2 🧪🌾

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

One biodiversity hotspot to rule them all: Mark Brundrett shows that the Southwest Australian Floristic Region is probably "the most specialised flora on Earth" (freely available from the WA Royal Society www.rswa.org.au/journal/volu... ) 1/2 🌾🧪

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

There's unexpected pleasures in taking a long time to get through the backlog of New Yorkers ( this one from July 2022) @newyorker.com

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Picked these little fellas this morning. Historically, the challenge for Melbourne gardeners has been to ripen a tomato by Xmas day. However, November's maximum and minimum temperatures were nearly 4C above the early 20th C average 🧪#global heating

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

In awe of Calvin Trillin who can sit on a jewel of an anecdote like this for 60 years bsky.app/profile/newy...

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Now, the reason Fitzgerald River Nat. Park is a biodiversity sacred site is that despite being a fairly monotonous stretch of flat sand, the beta diversity is out of this world. FRNP laughs scornfully at the ecological notion that floristic turnover is driven by "gradients" 🧪🌾

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Every plant-person should see Hakea victoria at least once in their lifetime (Fitzgerald River National Park)🧪🌾

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

It wouldn't be hard to develop one, it just needs to look a bit like this, right? A dark or coloured dot in the middle, surrounded by a grey-scale cloud, fading with distance from the centre.

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Some #speleothems can have very dark colours, yet contain zero non-carbonate residue. They effectively grew in ancient "clean rooms", incorporating colloidal organics directly from dripwater (maybe from microbes). Pliocene, Nullarbor, Australia (photo:@isotopedude.bsky.social) 🧪

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

This is a basically a "clean" speleothem, despite the colouring and laminations. After dissolution in HCl, very little acid-resistant residue remains. No pollen content. ca. 125 ka, Naracoorte Caves, South Australia 🧪

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

This is a "dirty" speleothem: essentially a laminated siltstone, ~cemented with calcite. It probably grew close to a fair-sized cave entrance, allowing dust-sized particles (mineral and biological) to become entrained (Wilgarup Cave, Western Australia). Contains ca. 2000 pollen/gram calcite 🧪

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

capturing old data is hard, sometimes too hard 🧪

a screen capture of a photocopied, hand-drawn table from a PhD dissertation, 1961. Essentially unrecoverable data

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Northern Hemisphere paleobotanists interpret tiny leaves as clear indicators of aridity, and use them to interpret past climates (eg including the Cretaceous). Here's Pseudanthus orbicularis on Genoa Peak (Paleozoic granites), eastern Victoria, Australia, with about 1060 mm rain/year.🧪

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 30/09/2024

e.g. in this passage, is he being snobby about this? Of course, "some ingenious gentleman" is conventionally interpreted as having been Whewell himself. The etymological argument used here is entirely consistent with Whewell's verbose work on scientific nomenclature (Novum Organon Renovatum et al)

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 30/09/2024

I agree, Whewell celebrates the excellence of Sommerville's science communication! (while at the same time he attributes the particular *nature* of her thinking to her gender).

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