Ena's 2024 Birthday Artwork Was Drawn And Painted Traditionally Unlike The Other Commissioned Artworks

Ena's 2024 birthday artwork was drawn and painted traditionally unlike the other commissioned artworks for the game. Yukoring, the artist, confirmed on Twitter that it was painted using watercolors and showed the art in its original form.

i was outside for a couple hours today looking and watching the birds and looking at every plant and the huge variety of bugs on the plants

When you consider from the tiny, bug sized perspective of a bug, each species of plant...is its own biome

Each species of plant is food for its own specialist species of bugs that can eat ONLY that plant, (or it's close relatives, sometimes) and cannot eat anything else (E.g. Monarch butterflies with Milkweeds)

You can see this with aphids. Aphids that suck juices of Goldenrod are red, aphids of milkweed are yellowish orange, and aphids of curly dock are slate gray

Each species of plant has its own chemicals that protect it from being eaten by bugs that are susceptible, taking away competition for bugs that don't mind the chemicals

THEREFORE...each species of plant has its own characteristic fauna

And beyond that

Each species of plant has its own "terrain" (the structure of the stems and leaves and how they are positioned, what kinds of surfaces they provide to sit on or hide under)

Flowering plants each have their own nectar and pollen and their flowers are structured and colored differently to be specialized for the favored pollinator. (I wish I was a bee so I could taste how different each flower's nectar is...)

Each species of plant's leaves shade against the sun differently, each hairy or smooth stem captures drops of dew differently, and the shapes of leaves and stems and how they branch provides different environments that could be easy or difficult to navigate with wings or with legs.

I notice things I never would have read in books. I notice beetles and earwigs tucking themselves between leaves or in immature flower heads waiting for nighttime. I notice tiny spiders making webs in the underside of a folded leaf. I see ants crawling along the stems up to the flowers to drink nectar, and wonder how a tiny ant brain navigates the complicated 3D maze of stems and leaves.

It would be so time consuming to walk all the way up the stem of each and every flower, so the best plants for ants must be plants where the flowers touch and the ants can walk from one flower to the other. I saw ants on Yarrow and Lilac, and both of those plants are like that, with bunches of flowers close together.

Some bugs like to hang out underneath leaves, others on stems, still others beneath petals...bugs are living entire lives, working and eating and resting and having sex and caring for their young, and they need places to do these things. And when you're as small as a bug a plant is like a huge skyscraper or a whole neighborhood, but each species of plant would have different features and amenities.

So by introducing a greater diversity of plants, it allows for FAR more bugs, which explains the huge increase in bugs i've been seeing, which explains the huge increase in birds.

everyone say hi to Dennis. He is today's gender!

literally cannot make this shit up

That pig nosed turtle looks so happy!

Pig-nosed Turtle (Carettochelys insculpta), juvenile, family Carettochelyidae, found in northern Australia and southern New Guinea

ENDANGERED.

These turtles have no scales, and thus have a leathery shell. Its shell is made of bone, however, unlike “softshell turtles” in the family Trionychidae.

photographs by daniilphotos

birch boy