Carl Safina discusses #animal emotions on the Oprah Podcast:
"When we love someone, we feel that we want to be close to them... in our house, our dogs are never given any kind of a treat or fed upstairs in the bedroom. But at night, they come upstairs. Why? Because they want to be near us."
Today marks 10 years since Cecil the #lion was killed by a trophy hunter.
Today on our blog, Safina Center Fellow @mstarling.bsky.social speaks with Dr. Andy Loveridge, the director of Panthera’s lion program and one of the biologists tracking Cecil with GPS tags before his untimely death.
NYT headline: How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost Here's the inside story of the case that could set the movement back a generation.
This framing is beneath contempt. The Christian right and MAGA launched an unprecedented assault on the civil rights of a tiny minority and successfully weaponized the pseudoliberal establishment - led by the NYT - to provide it with a medical controversy pretext that doesn’t actually exist.
This framing exists because the decision is instantly obvious as one of the legal atrocities of US history, like Dred Scot, the 1870s Civil Rights Cases, Korematsu. The Times doesn’t want to say “The Supreme Court stripped rights out of law” so instead it says “Here’s why they did it to themselves”
Thank you to @safinacenter.bsky.social for believing in my work in the intersections of climate, media, and research. Check out what I've been up to with my digital web series, Teaching Climate Together Season 2
"You don’t have to be on the Serengeti or the bottom of the ocean to know what birds are at the feeder today and what phase the moon is in and whether a warm front is coming to deliver a lightning show tonight." - @4fishgreenberg.bsky.social and @csafina.bsky.social
#EarthDay #EarthDay2025
A Prattling of Puffins
Collagraph print made using a mountboard base, sellotape, textured wallpaper and masking tape.
Sometimes keeping it simple works? Anyone else go silly over puffins?
#collagraph #printmaking #seabirds #puffins
Osedax worms don’t wait for change—they dissolve obstacles. These bone-eating worms secrete acid to break down whale bones, unlocking nutrients for entire ecosystems. When the world falls, someone’s gotta turn it into something useful. 🌊🪱 #WormWednesday #DeepSea Image from @mbarinews.bsky.social
Thank you, Samus Aran 🫡
Interested in our work? Check out our Safina Center Network #StarterPack and follow our fellows, affiliates, staff, and friends!
go.bsky.app/Snj85xL
GenAI has polluted image search results, especially for animal pics. It’s now basically impossible to find accurate art references.
Enter this: a repository of open-access, AI-free images of wild & exotic taxa. Artists creating *without AI* have blanket permission for derivative/transformative use.
Sleepy little guy 🥹
To be clear, I don't disavow journalism—I think it's integral to a healthy society.
But working within the field as a trans person was miserable and exhausting. Everyone else is allowed to have an opinion about your existence but you.
This was a painfully relatable read. Being a journalist gave me the power to amplify people's voices, but the structures that traditional outlets were built upon did everything to drown them out.
Especially the voices of people like me.
I'm sorry, October was my WHAT????
Omg lmk what you think afterword I love this vn
A new episode of the Safina Center podcast is out now!
Hear from Hob Osterlund, our Conservationist-in-Residence, about her decades of experience working with the Laysan #albatross of #Kauai, #Hawaii.
Out now on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and our website!
#conservation
I'm certainly biased given that Carl is my boss, but I'm being completely sincere when I say that this is perhaps the most meaningful book I've ever read.
I cannot recommend it enough.
Last night, I was heading home from my partner's apartment and ended up on a train full of people leaving Trump's MSG rally. I have never seen more fashion crimes in one place.
I also overheard a lot of awful conversations. It was like I was in a train car full of hate.
View from a sailboat near Jan Mayen Island, north of Iceland. The railing along the side of the deck is covered in ice, as is much of the deck itself. There is a snow-covered mountain in the distance.
A Northern bottlenose whale breaching. Its round head is emerging from the ocean.
A view of Svalbard and the calm sea from a distance. There are snow-covered plateaus in the distance and nearby floating ice. The sea water is a deep blue and is perfectly reflecting the landscape.
Belén Garcia Ovide piloting the sailing vessel "Tilvera." She sits in captain's seat and looks out through a foggy window at the sea, carefully navigating fields of ice. She is wearing a large, puffy winter coat and a beanie.
"During the last two weeks we became small and vulnerable while sailing the imposing offshore Arctic #Ocean."
Safina Center Fellow Belén Garcia Ovide encounters northern bottlenose #whales, storms, and camaraderie along her trip through the #Arctic:
www.safinacenter.org/blog/sailing...
A satellite photo of Hurricane Milton over the Gulf of Mexico, taken from the International Space Station. At the time, it was a category 4 storm.
"Our #coastlines are not built to withstand the type of rainfall and flooding scientists predict as record-high ocean temperatures fuel larger, more rapidly intensifying storms."
Safina Center Fellow @mstarling.bsky.social reflects on #Hurricane #Milton:
www.safinacenter.org/blog/eye-to-...
"Ecosystems and more-than-human beings are practically and discursively transformed from living beings with rights to peace and happiness, into products to be consumed by humans"
Safina Center Fellow Priya Parrotta on luxury tourism:
www.safinacenter.org/blog/of-hote...
🌏 #conservation #environment
A photo of a Laysan albatross chick's head. The last of the chick's downy feathers are all around the sides of their head, evoking a "Benjamin Franklin" style haircut.
As they reach maturity, the last of the Laysan albatross' downy baby feathers are usually relegated to their head. This leads to some very funky hairdos!
Safina Center Conservationist-in-Residence Hob Osterlund shares some of her favorites on our blog:
www.safinacenter.org/blog/origina...
More pictures of him because he's my favorite little guy :)
My partner's dog loves to cuddle. This is what I woke up to yesterday.
I've fallen to the plight of getting really into a fantastic single-player game (ER) and a complex fighting game (BlazBlue) at the same time. It's sort of refreshing, after not really playing video games much for the past two or three years. It's been a surprisingly fun avenue for expression.
I've been making a greater effort to bring my work outside recently. Not because I enjoy doing working on my laptop outdoors—but because I need to squeeze in as much vitamin D as I can before I spend all of my free time playing Elden Ring 🫠
Hey, have you picked up Jasmin’s book yet? You should!
