Flora/fauna nips: 4 apps to know them all; bunny rescues; Schmidt Sting Pain Index has marvelous descriptions

Image from Justin Schmidt's 2016 book The Sting of the Wild

Ever considered ranking the pain of insect stings? Entomologist Justin Schmidt did. He poetically described and ranked stinging powers from 'spicy' to 'shockingly electric' on his Schmidt Sting Pain Index, reports Lauren Young of Atlas Obscura. After being stung by a "fierce black polybia wasp," he had this to say. "A ritual gone wrong, satanic. The gas lamp in the old church explodes in your face when you light it." The index is featured in Schmidt's 2016 book The Sting of the Wild.

Arbor Day may have passed, but loving trees is timeless. Here's a delightfully deciduous list of tree reads. "Trees are fascinating: The oldest living organism on Earth is a tree, and forest biomes cover one-third of the Earth's surface. Trees provide fruit, spices, nuts, timber, shade, habitats, and oxygen, as well as absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."--Trees: An Illustrated Celebration by Kelsey Oseid.

Male Eastern Box Turtle (Box Turtle Conservation photo)

Box turtles need our help. "Various factors, most of them human-related such as exports for the pet trade and loss of habitat are causing the population of box turtles to dwindle. . . . If you do take a box turtle as a pet, do plenty of research in advance to know exactly what its needs are. The Box Turtle Conservation website is a great place to start. Another great resource to follow is Reptile.Guide.

Every flower, every plant, every tree: These four apps can help you identify them all, reports Michael J. Coren of The Washington Post. "Thanks to artificial intelligence trained on millions of observations, anyone with a smartphone can snap a picture or record a sound to identify tens of thousands of species, from field bluebells to native bumblebees. . . . I'm now on a first-name basis with most of my wild neighbors. It has reconnected me to a natural world I love, yet never studied deeply enough to know all its characters and settings. . . . The easiest to use is Seek."

Some rabbits have been rescued from tree branches.
(Photo by Eric Hopson, San Luis National Wildlife Refuge )

California's record-setting snowpack melt is great for ducks and fish. "Still for other animals, the rising waters are perilous. Just ask the bunnies," reports Lauren Sommer of NPR. "In the Central Valley, evacuations are underway for endangered riparian brush rabbits. The small brown cottontails, only about a foot long, are finding themselves stranded on small areas of dry land as nearby rivers overtop their banks. . . . A team from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has captured and moved more than 360 rabbits to higher ground to protect a species that's coming back from the brink of extinction."

Radioactive dogs? "What we can learn from Chernobyl's strays . . . They've lived and bred inside the Exclusion Zone for generations—and scientists believe their DNA may transform our knowledge about the effects of radiation," reports Sharon Guynup of National Geographic. Elaine Ostrander, who runs the Dog Genome Project at the National Human Genome Research Institute, told her, "These Chernobyl dogs are valuable to science because they've lived and evolved in isolation for 15 generations since the disaster. They die young, by three or four years old; 10 to 12 is normal for 75-pound dogs. . . . Ultimately, we want to know what happened to the genomic DNA that allowed [the dogs] to live and breed and survive in a radioactive environment."

How old must "a cultivar" be to be considered an heirloom? "Some experts say it is those that existed before 1951, when the first hybrid vegetable cultivars were developed. Others define it as any cultivar dating to 1940 or before. . . . Heirlooms are plant cultivars (cultivated varieties) that have been grown for decades, even centuries, and their seeds saved and passed down through families or communities," reports Therese Ciesinski of Lancaster Farming. "Heirlooms have a lot more going for them than simply adaptation. They are time-tested, with intense flavors that surpass anything at the supermarket. They are often more nutritious. You can save the seeds and grow the variety in the future . . . And growing heirlooms help preserve biodiversity and history."