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Enjoy Nature Daily: AM Golden Hour


Fish Folk
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That’s so beautiful! I used to fear any sunlight on my tanks... but now... wish I had more natural light.

I remember when studying up on raising kribensis, I came across a video posted showing off a krib colony getting daylight... crazy purples...

 

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1 minute ago, Fish Folk said:

That’s so beautiful! I used to fear any sunlight on my tanks... but now... wish I had more natural light.

I remember when studying up on raising kribensis, I came across a video posted showing off a krib colony getting daylight... crazy purples...


 

I was the same way. I thought any direct sunlight would doom me to eternal algae. Then I discovered plants and tank balancing and learned to enjoy the sunlight as part of the equation.

Incredible video BTW! 

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Theory often doesn't account for all the facets of practice, and when it is used as the sole guiding principle for practice often fails spectacularly, especially outside of the realm of natural science, the worst, and most tragic being culture, and politics.

The following story rather amusingly illustrates the follies of the fanciful statements of pure theoretical thinking, it was posted by a poster by the name of Cecil on www.physics.org a while ago.

"...According to an account this story was initially circulated in German technical universities in the 1930s. Supposedly during dinner a biologist asked an aerodynamics expert about insect flight. The aerodynamicist did a few calculations and found that, according to the accepted theory of the day, bumblebees didn’t generate enough lift to fly. The biologist, delighted to have a chance to show up those arrogant SOBs in the hard sciences, promptly spread the story far and wide.

Once he sobered up, however, the aerodynamicist surely realized what the problem was — a faulty analogy between bees and conventional fixed-wing aircraft. Bees’ wings are small relative to their bodies. If an airplane were built the same way, it’d never get off the ground. But bees aren’t like airplanes, they’re like helicopters. Their wings work on the same principle as helicopter blades — to be precise, “reverse-pitch semirotary helicopter blades,” to quote one authority. A moving airfoil, whether it’s a helicopter blade or a bee wing, generates a lot more lift than a stationary one.

The real challenge with bees wasn’t figuring out the aerodynamics but the mechanics: specifically, how bees can move their wings so fast — roughly 200 beats per second, which is 10 or 20 times the firing rate of the nervous system. The trick apparently is that the bee’s wing muscles (thorax muscles, actually) don’t expand and contract so much as vibrate, like a rubber band. A nerve impulse comes along and twangs the muscle, much as you might pluck a guitar string, and it vibrates the wing up and down a few times until the next impulse comes along."

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4 minutes ago, Jungle Fan said:

 — to be precise, “reverse-pitch semirotary helicopter blades,” to quote one authority. A moving airfoil, whether it’s a helicopter blade or a bee wing, generates a lot more lift than a stationary one.

I shot this video earlier in the spring. You can see “reverse-pitch semirotary helicopter blades” in motion.

 

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@Daniel plenty of them now on the Irises, Columbines, Cornflowers, purple Salvia, Clematis and Honeysuckle in my backyard. I don't use pesticides and chemicals because of the bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, hummingbird moths, lizards, and bunnies in our backyard. I think the lawn and garden service guy in our neighborhood spits out the window of his car every time he drives past my house because of the many times I've told him no when he came to offer his services out of his bag of chemicals every spring.

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