“It’s like a story out of ‘Game of Thrones,’” said @danielkronauer.bsky.social.

It was particularly exciting because while scientists know that ant invasions and takeovers happen, the details can be murky.

That's simply because they happen mostly underground.

Now, we can see the parasitic queen sneak in, spray the real queen, and retreat while the workers swarm.

When an entomologist friend of his saw the video of Shimada's experiments with parasitic queens, he knew they needed to be published.

“I lost my words when I saw the video,” he said.

The discovery was made by Taku Shimada. He's not a scientist, but calling him an "ant enthusiast" is putting it lightly. He raises and sells ants, studies them, searches for them in the wild, and takes gorgeous photos of them.

Queen-on-queen violence has been documented in ants before. But this subterfuge behavior, documented in a new @currentbiology.bsky.social study, has never before been observed and recorded.

Diego leads a Cascadia research center. He and Greg Beroza, who runs the Southern CA Earthquake Center, said while it could be considered in hazard planning eventually, it's too soon to panic about the Cascadia-San Andreas double whammy.

"We should be preparing for the single whammy," Beroza said.

Still, some highlighted that this is how science works. Someone presents a big idea, and the rest of the research community digs in.

"I'm glad they did this work," says geophysicist @diegosismologo.bsky.social. "It gives the rest of us a challenge. It's how the field progresses."

Outside experts worry, though, that connecting sediment cores 100 kilometers apart still has too many issues to be solid.

The cores are also difficult to date with enough precision to say how quickly quakes followed each other, if indeed the sediment records quakes in the first place.

He reads this as Cascadia triggering an earthquake, which changes the stresses in the Earth's uppermost layer of crust — potentially including the nearby San Andreas.

That would then trigger the San Andreas to go off, creating a particular stripe of sediment in the record.

@goldfinger300.bsky.social has been studying this idea for decades, using cores of sediment from the seafloor to figure out when earthquakes happened in the past.

Records from Oregon and northern California seemed to match up. Mysterious stacks of sediment suggested two quakes, one after another.

I asked seven geologists what they thought of the idea.

The overall response was that it's an intriguing idea, and one worth exploring. Based on geophysics, it could be possible.

But from the evidence presented so far, saying Cascadia has for sure triggered the San Andreas is "overselling."

But Upthegrove wants to change the system entirely. The plan proposes that revenue will eventually come from carbon credits and other to-be-purchased sites at risk of conversion to non-forest uses, like development.

He calls the timber-funding-schools model "archaic."

Read the full story on HCN!

Environmental groups have applauded the initial proposal but look forward to collaboratively homing in on which stands will be conserved under the new plan.

Timber advocates and some local officials worry that removing 77k acres from harvest will shrink funding for public schools, mostly rural.

Upthegrove in August proposed conserving 77,000 acres of "structurally complex forest," or older (but not 'old growth') forests with diverse tree types and ages and other plants.

How do you know you're in one?

"You just get that warm, fuzzy, green, mossy feeling,” one forest scientist said.

Washington state has 2.4 million acres of forest held in trust. Half of that is already conserved; the other half is harvestable timber. Revenue from timber goes largely to public schools.

But "we shouldn't be pitting children against trees," says public lands commissioner Dave Upthegrove.

Check out the rest of the story to read how the state is planning for fires in western Washington!

And some good news: we finally got a summer rain today, granting firefighters a brief reprieve in the fire's spread.

app.watchduty.org/i/54759

But if conditions are just right — or just wrong — a smoldering fire can turn into a scorcher. Strong, dry winds from the east can spur fire on.

It's why firefighters keep an uneasy eye on fires than seem to be slowly growing in the Olympics. Any one, they worry, could turn into "the big one."

Overall, it's a recipe for more fire starts.

Many fires in wet western forests don't race along — they smolder, spreading slowly through dense, damp undergrowth. But rugged terrain and thick canopies mean those fires can be hard to fight.

Autumn rains often put them out.