Remember when you were a kid, and you’d flip over a rock just to enjoy being grossed out by all the many-legged photosensitive beasties suddenly scurrying out at you? Miss that skin-crawling thrill of discovery? You’re in luck! Via Negativa has declared September 2 International Rock-Flipping Day.
I have no idea what would happen if every scientist in the world flipped a rock at the same time all around the planet, but I don’t think we want to find out, so you can flip your rock any time on September 2. Paint, photograph, observe, identify, or otherwise document what you uncover:
The point is simply to have fun, and hopefully learn something at the same time. We don’t want to over-determine what that something should be: those of a more scientific frame of mind might focus on i.d.s or ecological interactions, while those of an artistic or poetic bent could go in a different direction entirely. Pictures alone would suffice, of course.
There’s even a flickr pool for uploading your rocky revelations.
And put the rock back, of course. We don’t want a bunch of homeless centipedes, beetles and grubs.
Err … in the place where I come from (the Alpes close to the Mediterranean see), it was not so rare in hot summer days that flipping a rock would lead to a not-so-pleasant meeting with a viper or a scorpion … We tended to find different games as kids.
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When I was three or four, I was obsessed with flipping over rocks and looking for “trapdoor” spiders. Unfortunately, not only are they not found under rocks, but neither are they indigenous to my northern New England home. Why was there no friendly, neighborhood arachnologist to tell me this?