u/Halomonas_titanica

Most of my plants are coming out of their dormancy period. Three out of four plants have new leaves, with this one being furthest along. It's the cultivar 'Princettia Pink'. The other one next to it, barely visible to the right of the photo, is an 'Ice Crystal' and still hasn't woken up.

I also have a glitter poinsettia and a regular red variety that I propagated from a tree (so I have no idea which variety it is). Both are leafing out, but are still behind the princettia.

The workers are finally hatching! Over the past few days, 8 have appeared, giving the nest a total population of 11 adults. There's a few more pupae to go, and the nest's population will soon surpass 20 adults.

One pupa was recently dug out and destroyed. You can see its remains poking out of a cell towards the right side of the nest, next to other pupae. I'm not sure what the problem was with it, but it happens occasionally. Some pupae are duds, and the wasps seem to be able to detect that.

It is now time for me to transplant the colony to the outside world. But I need to choose the right time to do this. First of all, it has to be night, as the wasps are dormant and won't fly all over my face as soon as I touch the nest's cardboard support. It also needs to be followed by a quiet, sunny, warm day so that the wasps can make their orientation flight undisturbed.

I was going to do this tonight, but I had to postpone it because there's currently a thunderstorm, and there is going to be a lot of wind tomorrow through Saturday, meaning the earliest safe day for me to do this has to be on Sunday. By then, there might be 16 or more wasps on the nest, making the transplant more difficult. But nothing I haven't done before.

I will try to document the free ranging process.

I have been growing this nest in captivity (in a 3x3ft mesh cage) for about six weeks now, on a diet of just honey and mealworm pupae. I am quite impressed with its size. In fact, over the 9 years that I've been keeping paper wasps, this is by far my biggest founding-stage nest! It's also a lot bigger than any nests in the wild at the same stage of development.

But it won't be captive forever. It is theoretically possible to keep a nest in captivity past the founding stage and throughout its entire breeding cycle, however it's quite chaotic and messy, with most wasps constantly flying around trying to get out, and only a minority of wasps actually working. This is especially true with bigger colonies from about 10 workers up. This nest in partcular might get to a hundred wasps on it at peak, which is just unfeasible in any cage smaller than a room, which I don't have. So I decided I'll be releasing this colony in free range. I will do that as soon as the first 5-6 workers start to hatch and become operative, which should happen around next week. I'll just attach the nest to the outside of my window, so I can still watch them develop from the comfort of my house. After that, I will look for a smaller nest to keep.

Lately I've been looking into the bacterium Halomonas titanicae which was discovered in 2010 from recovered samples of the RMS Titanic shipwreck (paper). I even thought it'd be a cool username. It's a very interesting organism for its ability to carry out the process of biocorrosion, ie. digesting steel and hydrocarbons, a superpower that is being studied by biologists as a possible solution to certain forms of environmental pollution. The bacterium is responsible for the iconic "rusticles" you can see in any footage and photos of the wreck, and is slowly eroding it away until eventually nothing will be left.

A common misconception about this bacterium is that it is supposedly endemic (exclusive) to the Titanic shipwreck. I used to believe that too, to the point that I was against any measures for preserving the wreck (such as encasing in some protective agent) because I thought that would mean causing its extinction, which may sound silly to you, but as a nature conservation kinda guy I have my qualms about willingly causing the extinction of an entire species, even if it's just a tiny microorganism.

So as I looked at the available literature, I realized this is not at all the case! H.titanicae is by no means exclusive to the sipwreck, in fact it has been detected at many locations all across the world: it has been detected in the Tangyin hydrothermal field, southern Okinawa Trough (deep sea smoker just east of Taiwan); in the Romashkinskoe oilfield in Russia (interestingly enough, hundreds of miles away from any oceans); in the Mar del Plata Harbor in Argentina; and in China's Yellow Sea in association with the seaweed Spirulina platensis.

The diversity and distribution of these locations implies that H.titanicae is actually a cosmopolitan species that inhabits any highly saline environment where hydrocarbon runoff is present.
It's worth noting that each of these discoveries respresent different strains of the bacterium, not the BH1 strain which so far has only been found on the wreck and may well be endemic to it.

Mind you, I still believe there are good reasons not to attempt to salvage the wreck, first and foremost the fact that it's essentialy a mass grave site, also any attempt at preserving it would be hilariously expensive. But this is a topic for another day.

So, yeah. This was me nerding over a bacterium.
Have a nice rest of the week my fellow titanic enthusiasts!

I'm a Titanic newbie, I've only been interested in the ship and her fateful maiden voyage for a few months, but it's rapidly become an obsession, to the point that it's all I can talk about (and i'km also learning morse code because of it!). I got this in the mail today and I'm so excited to start reading it! I feel like this is the Holy Bible of the Titanic community.

As you can tell, I am still a beginner. I'm on lesson 2 on lcwo.net, so I'm still dealing with just MKU. I absolutely know how to tell these three letters apart at the default speed of 20wpm. I have no problem with that. But this is my 9th attempt in a row and I never seem to improve past a certain point. I fluctuate between 7% and 15% error rate, because every single time I take the test i do the first few groups of letters flawlessy, but then around the 35 second mark my attention drops off and I start making silly mistakes. I should mention that I do have a medically recognized disorder of attention (ADHD). But I did not think it would represent such an obstacle.

Now I don't know how to go about this:
Should I still keep trying on lesson 2 until I can reliably score <10% error rate (by reliably I mean at least 3 times in a row)? Or should I go straight to lesson 3, since i've successfully associated the sounds with the letters, and accept the fact that my scores will never be reliably high because I can't keep my attention up for the entire duration of a clip?

Have you had similar problems? How did you overcome them?

Any feedbacks appreciated.

I transplanted it in a bigger pot as soon as I got home. There's already a pineapple growing on it. Hardiness zone 10b so i can keep Phineas outside year-round. So here's the questions:

1)is it an edible variety? are there even varieties that aren't edible?

2)why is it so small? can it grow? i suppose that friut will remain that way, can the plant then grow and make bigger griuts in the future?

3)How do i know it's ripe?

4)there are side shoots on the base of the plant. Can i separate them to make more plants? will they go to fruit? (ikr this is 3 questions disguised as one, sorry)

5)does it need a lot of fertilizer? is it a fast grower?