what if instead of writing a name in the death note you had to draw that person or creature as a drawing before it died but the more sentient and smart something is the more realistic the drawing had to be so you can doodle a fly and it would die but a person would have to be pretty realistic to work but one day you’re messing around and killing seagulls at the beach because you’re a freak i guess but you go to draw one of the seagulls and it doesn’t die so you shrug because maybe its smarter than the other ones so you do it more realistically but it still doesn’t die which is weird because it should have definitely bit the dust by now so you go home and study how to draw seagulls for days and you take pictures of that specific seagull for reference until you finally go back to the beach and you sit there and you draw the most realistic depiction of a seagull anyone’s ever done and its more realistic than your other drawings even of people and as the seagull falls out of the sky, ill gotten fry in its mouth you realize you’ve just killed the smartest and and most sentient creature on the planet
side note, the guy in the photo and the guy who led the team that grew/described this absolute Unit is named Carlos Magdelena, hes a horticulturalist at the KEW who specializes in lily pads and is also known for being the guy who figured out how to grow the smallest lily pad species on earth, Nymphaea thermarum, from seed. it’s a species that’s now extinct in the wild and was brought to the KEW to keep it from all-out extinction, which it had an INCREDIBLY close brush with like, multiple times (it was native only to a single tiny hot spring in Rwanda that got drained from agricultural use).
here’s a picture of him holding it on top of the largest water lily in the world at the time of this photo, Victoria amazonica, which we now know is actually the second largest next to this new one, which is a close relative!
he also wrote a book of some of his stories of saving plants from extinction at the KEW called ‘the plant messiah’, which includes the story of N. thermarum. really cool non-academic read about rare plants and conservation, i need to reread it sometime!
