Jall's Blog

      I don’t remember how old I was when I first read The Very Hungry Caterpillar , but I do remember that it was my favorite childhood book. I always kept it on my nightstand, right next to my bed. My mom had a tan colored tote bag with The Very Hungry Caterpillar drawing on it and I would constantly steal it from her and carry my copy of the book around in it.       My favorite part of The Very Hungry Caterpillar has always been the fruit page with the little cut out holes. I thought it was so cool how Eric Carle designed it so it almost looked like a flip book to show how much the caterpillar ate each day. I always found it satisfying how the holes lined up perfectly as I turned the pages.       Eric Carle was an outstanding American author who wrote and illustrated many books that are still loved by children all over the world today. Carle was born in 1929 in New York, to two German immigrant parents. He moved back to St...

  Hey chat, I welcome you to my yap sesh about bivalves (clams, mussels, etc.) and Mackie’s book about some of them. Please excuse the slang for real for real, I need a way to keep y’all engaged because the topic I’m writing on is traditionally rather boring and not skibidi sigma. To start, Corbicula and Sphaeriidae are two types of small clams that live in freshwater habitats like ponds, rivers, lakes, etc. There is a third group, Unionidae, which is a group of mussels (not “clams”) that also lives in freshwater. In North America, Unionidae and Sphaeriidae are native. Both groups play an essential role in filter feeding and nutrient cycling. Without them, freshwater habitats would be more stagnant, murky, and overrun with algae suffocating most life. Basically, native bivalves are unpaid janitors.  Corbicula , on the other hand, is invasive and was introduced to the United States in the 1920s–1930s. In terms of using up resources, Corbicula solos, no diff, straining native...