Newly discovered spider makes a decoy of itself to scare off predators:

The spiders arrange debris along specialized silk strands called stabilimenta in a symmetrical form that makes it look almost exactly like a larger spider hanging in the web. Studies have found that some Cyclosaspecies have a higher survival rate against potential predators like paper wasps because the wasps end up attacking the debris in the web rather than the spider itself. As seen here, Cyclosa can make debris look a bit like a spider, but not nearly as detailed as the spiders found at the Tambopata Research Center which have a complex form that actually looks like a bigger version of themselves, complete with legs and all.

Via Rainforest Expeditions Blog

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit, — not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed - chased and hunted down as long as fun or a could could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones… It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods - trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving anding singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ’s time - and long before that - God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools - only Uncle Sam can do that.
John Muir, father of American conservation - 1897

(via sciencecenter)

In the presence of prairie dogs, I feel calm, safe, and reassured, sensing there is something more enduring than our own minds. I feel a peace that holds my heart, not because I believe this is better than the world we have created. I feel at peace because the memory of wild nature is held within the nucleus of each living cell. Our bodies remember wholeness in the midst of fragmentation.
Terry Tempest Williams, from Finding Beauty in a Broken World, 2008. p. 198

“Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. There is no time to it. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with the nature in the present, above time.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays