Today (yesterday?) is Blog Action Day '09, and the topic is "Climate Change". What a depressing, yet uplifting topic to blog about!

When you were just small kiddos, did you ever imagined how Earth would look like from space? Guess it would look like this:

And we are absolutely dwarfed by the immerse size of Earth!

What a wonderful world we live in!

Yet, we thoughtlessly pollute the environment. We create things that last forever and throw them away in an instant.

 

We breed animals in inhumane conditions, stacked up high like packed boxes. We clear acres of forests to grow lots of crops, and feed these animals for months. Just to slaughter them for a single meal.

And scoff when someone remarks about the sheer waste of energy producing so much food for so little gain.

Sigh...

How egoistic can we be? Somewhere between all the debate about global warming, we lost sight of the forest for the trees. The key issue is not about whether global warming is a natural phenomenon. It is about sustainable development.

We want our next generations to have a decent quality of life. We want them to see how beautiful this world is. We want them to experience snow falling softly around them. We want them to see the beautiful corals in the deep blue sea. We want them to be able to see the stars, and imagine how small they are if they look down to Earth.

Eat less meat. Dispose less garbage. Waste less paper. Waste less electricity. Recycle, reuse, reduce. Just live in moderation. Is that really so difficult?

I can't help but post this: ∃ vegetarian spiders!

Wired News: Kinder, Gentler Spider Eats Veggies, Cares for Kids

Each of the world’s 40,000 spider species survives by hunting and killing — except, that is, for Bagheera kiplingi, the world’s first vegetarian arachnid.

Found in Central America, the order-defying jumping spider eats nutrient-rich structures called Beltian bodies, which are found on the tips of Acacia trees. Trees produce the bodies to feed ants that defend them, which is a textbook example of what’s called co-evolutionary mutalism, and one that B. kiplingi has evolved to exploit.

In a paper published Monday in Current Biology, researchers describe the spider’s ant-evading habits and provide a molecular analysis of its body composition, proving that B. kiplingi is indeed what it eats: plants, with a few larval ants on the side. (After all, 400 million years of evolutionary habits die hard.)

A few other spiders have been documented consuming nectar, but only as a snack. No other spider is so predominantly vegetarian. And that’s not all: It looks like B. kiplingi males help care for eggs and young — something entirely unprecedented in the spider world.

The researchers are now studying whether there’s a link between B. kiplingi’s predilection for plants and parental concern. Maybe going veggie softened its heart.

Image: Current Biology

Citation: “Herbivory in a spider through exploitation of an ant-plant mutualism.” By Christopher J. Meehan, Eric J. Olson, Matthew W. Reudink, T. Kurt Kyser, and Robert L. Curry. Current Biology, Vol. 19, Issue 19, October 13, 2009.