Weren’t there like, several millions of years where trees evolved but nothing had come yet to break down wood, so like, generations of dead forest just fell on top of each other until some fungus was like “that looks yummy”?
ryedaft@sh.itjust.works
on 24 May 21:32
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The molecule is called lignin. And yes, there was a good 60 million years before that particular problem was cracked.
OrganicMustard@lemmy.world
on 24 May 22:05
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woodenghost@hexbear.net
on 24 May 23:18
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Yes, that’s when coal comes from. There were giant global fire storms, because of all the dead trees and also because there was more oxygen. The oxygen also caused insects to become gigantic. They don’t have lungs, just random holes in their body so the airs oxygen content limits their size.
Lemmyoutofhere@lemmy.ca
on 25 May 12:45
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It’s the circle of life. Plastics are a petrochemical, and those trees created our coal.
Now plastics weren’t technically evolved (unless you count human evolution)…but at least we got CRISPR to maybe speed things along with “evolving” a plastics predator.
i dont really know why human activity should be special. it’s evolved creatures doing weird shit, producing (temporarily?) undigestible stuff. there’s no rule saying you cant have the production outside your body, it’s just customary to use organs.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org
on 24 May 21:05
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I thought crab-like animals were all actually pretty closely related to each other, i.e. all crab-like animals are arthropods, which is a less broad category (despite the incredibly huge amount of species in it) than ‘all plants that can form a wooden trunk’. Any taxonomists here to confirm/deny?
Yes, but I think OP’s point is those 5-6 crab-events all came from a narrow taxonomic group. All plant families have some trees. Only one sub-group of animals contains crabs.
It is as if all trees only came from members of the lily family.
Tiempo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 24 May 21:12
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Land will be trees, beaches will be crabs, and I’ve heard oceans will be nothing but jellyfish
FistingEnthusiast@lemmynsfw.com
on 24 May 21:26
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Fish too
LanguageIsCool@lemmy.world
on 25 May 04:36
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That makes sense. And I feel like it makes me understand trees better. This is what I’m thinking.
The fitness landscape for a moving creature underwater is pretty limited. You gotta be hydrodynamic and there aren’t many solutions to that. But we still get variety; eels and jellyfish, for example.
With plants you also have some strong limitations. Plants don’t move. They’re rooted to the ground. Plus they compete over height. So, the solution set consists of sturdy and tall trees.
Moving creatures on land have a lot of more options so evolution achieved more variety. I’m not sure if distinct branches of moving creatures on land arrived at the “same” evolutionary solution.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
on 24 May 21:41
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Trees are tall because trees are tall.
OpenStars@discuss.online
on 24 May 21:54
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And it’s not even one creature or even type of creature. Look up rhizobium.
Tbf, as we learn more about our gut microbiomes, it turns out that humans are that way as well. Maybe that’s why we have the thoughts in our heads vs. the feelings in our guts… (no that’s actually not it at all, except… isn’t it though?).
I figure the feeling of being in your head is simply due to your eyeballs being located there. Now I want to put a 3d camera on my hips, and steam it to VR goggles.
So now I actually think this idea is on to something brilliant. I have been diving into neuroscience lately and this sounds like an amazing experimental method.
It’s like non-surgically transplanting your eyes into your hips. Why do that? To further refine brain-body mapping.
We turn our head instinctively to aid vision. Once our brain realizes that visual input improves only when we move our hips, body awareness will shift significantly.
@DoubleSpace@lemm.ee the best ideas start as jokes
LanguageIsCool@lemmy.world
on 25 May 04:28
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If a future VR is strong enough to embody us in another body — an animal, a conjured crazy creature, whatever — would we eventually “learn” it? Move around in it? Be it? I feel like the answer is yes.
The body is the mind. Change your body, change your mind.
Just saying, polymorph spells are problematic.
LanguageIsCool@lemmy.world
on 27 May 15:51
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I agree with this. But surely there has to be a limit. If we create an extremely complex body where its movement requires solving rhythmic problems based on changing prime numbers, or something like that, would we be able to do it? If we hook up the VR to a squirrel to control a human body, would it be able to do it?
explodicle@sh.itjust.works
on 25 May 01:50
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Microphones and headphones too.
General_Effort@lemmy.world
on 25 May 12:13
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Here’s one reason why a hip level perspective would be so helpful as a neuroscience tool. It is an ethical and reversible experimental intervention that could add real experimental power to functional brain-body mapping.
I am certain a proper neuroscientist could come up with even better and more detailed questions to ask using the method.
Something like this could even be used as a therapy tool for trauma, perhaps, once the impact of the perspective shifts were understood well. A common trauma response is dissociation and common therapy methods include ways to help people reconnect with their whole bodies again.
IndiBrony@lemmy.world
on 24 May 22:10
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tbf isn’t a tree just a plant but big? makes sense that any plant species can evolve into a tree just by getting bigger
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
on 24 May 22:44
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Well there are certain features needed for a plant to get that big. So those features had to evolve independently each time which is a bit interesting. Wood is the famous example.
Yeah, like monocots don’t have secondary growth so they have to use some tricks to get that large. Like palms first grow to a certain stem size on the ground (or below) and only then grow up. I wonder how lycopods grew that large considering they are not really ferns even… Oh and ferns also can grow to be trees!
Fuck_u_spez_@sh.itjust.works
on 25 May 02:03
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I think it’s more complicated than that. For example, bamboo “trees” are actually in the grass family.
i didn’t even put it in a bookmark folder, it’s just loose on my bookmark bar because it’s such an interesting post that i reread from time to time
bananabenana@lemmy.world
on 25 May 00:27
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Maybe…but I doubt many of these phylogenies use DNA, and if so, likely only a single or few genes. Nowhere near enough resolution to accurately determine genetic relatedness. Woody plants may actually be more related than we think.
These sorts of phylogenies tend to use morphological characteristics which is an unreliable measure of genetic relatedness.
Deconceptualist@lemm.ee
on 25 May 00:33
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My sister in law recently quipped that “Trees are a social construct” and at first I thought she was just being glib but now I can’t get that statement out of my head.
resting_parrot@sh.itjust.works
on 25 May 02:29
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I listen to a podcast called Completely Arbortrary. They talk about a different tree species each episode. They say trees are a strategy, not a strict definition.
LeFantome@programming.dev
on 26 May 00:29
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That and every Stargate planet is Vancouver
tamagotchicowboy@hexbear.net
on 25 May 00:56
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Its trees and crabs all the way down.
NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world
on 25 May 01:14
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Also, no such thing as fish.
Google it.
boydster@sh.itjust.works
on 25 May 01:33
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Impossible. If there were no such thing as fish, how could bees be fish?
NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world
on 25 May 02:06
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I don’t have the tools to know how to respond to this comment. You win.
Edit: Holy shit. I just did a quick google. Boydster is not shitting us. Just google “bees are fish.” Oddly enough, this actually furthers the thesis of fish not existing.
To add on for anyone who is lazy like me, the thing where Google summarizes says California has classified bees as fish under an environmental protection act. According to the first result (Reddit) it’s because fish is a catch all term in that law. Instead of listing all the animals they just use fish. Because fish,bees, and the other animals are all invertebrates.
Now whoever reads this has three Lemmy comments, a reddit thread reference, and an ai overview reference as some solid sources
SuperNovaStar@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 25 May 23:05
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… and Wikipedia states that the category of “fish” is paraphylatic, meaning that it is defined by convention rather than ‘fact’ and its boundaries can be argued, since it excludes some of the descendants of fish.
also, as pointed out by another commenter, we use the word fish to describe lots of things that are not included in this definition, like starfish and crayfish.
DancingBear@midwest.social
on 25 May 23:20
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So you’re suggesting that because we all evolved from a sesspool swamp we are all fish?
I’m down
Trees also do not have a real definition. But you think you know what a tree is.
Fish have a more strict definition than trees.
I provided you a source please name a fish that is an invertebrate or what not that is really cool and has the backbone in some other genetically cool place
SuperNovaStar@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 26 May 00:38
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Having recently learned about trees, I actually don’t think I know what a tree is. at least, not enough to create a reasonable, non-blurry definition of “tree.”
You’ve defined fish as being vertebrates, and as such I cannot find an invertebrate that fits that definition. But what you can’t do is just say the word “fish” and expect me to know what you mean - you have to provide a definition, and I could provide a different definition in a different context and neither of us would really be “wrong.”
If you did just say “fish” without providing a definition, I would be tempted to either exclude sharks or include crabs, depending on context.
DancingBear@midwest.social
on 26 May 14:26
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Sharks are fish I believe but I am not the one making the definitions. Wikipedia / fish …
FooBarrington@lemmy.world
on 25 May 05:56
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I don’t have the tools to know how to respond to this comment. You win.
This is the best way I’ve ever seen utter befuddlement expressed.
Chapeau!
faythofdragons@slrpnk.net
on 25 May 07:49
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NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world
on 26 May 04:37
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A large variety of aquatic phylogeny that is edible and nutritious for a carnivorous aquatic mammalian diet.
Admittedly it’s going to be harder to put into a show tune, but I’m sure they’ll come up with some catchy names.
BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net
on 25 May 01:49
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The genus Cornus is a huge middle finger to growth-form-based taxonomy. It contains dogwood trees and also bunchberry, an itty bitty herb that grows on the forest floor.
The first “trees” were also lycopods whose closest extant relatives are the club mosses, a name which gives you an idea of how big they get. All the coal in the world is from a period where plants figured out wood before decomposers learned how to break it down and is mainly the result of a bunch of lycopod trunks sinking into peat bugs and slowly getting compressed.
We use a specific type of Lycopodium as a control group to calculate pollen counts and various other metrics in palaeoecology. It’s pollen is super distinct.
BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net
on 26 May 00:53
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That’s super neat. Is that little triangular bit at the top a germ pore or something else? It’s funny how you get one clade that takes what you’d think would be a really optimizable form like a spore or a pollen grain and takes a left turn with it. In fungi, Entolomas are really identifiable because their spores are pink and cube shaped.
The Y like structure comes from their formation in a sort of honeycomb cluster of 4. This structure makes them easy to break off from the host and also provides a weak point for germination. :) I wish I could differentiate fungal spores, I see a lot of them.
BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net
on 26 May 01:46
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Oof, I do not envy anyone trying to identify fungi through the fossil record. Color and fruiting body structure tend to play pretty big roles in ID because the spores themselves tend to be small and fragile, so except for a few genera that are known for highly ornamented spores it can be pretty challenging.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
on 25 May 02:43
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Also cool that for a period of like 60 million years, nothing decomposed dead trees. As they would die or fall over, they’d just stay there, piling up. This is where most oil came from. The massive amounts of trees stacking up before bacteria and fungus evolved to decomposed them. Imagine 60 million years worth of trees just lying around.
*Thought I’d add an edit, since this post got quite a few eyes on it: It was mostly coal that all those trees turned into. Not oil.
ravenaspiring@sh.itjust.works
on 25 May 03:13
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I love this fact, and am curious where you learned it?
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
on 25 May 04:09
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I learned it nearly 30 years ago in school. I just did a search and found a link about it, though.
Also, seems that either I remembered wrongly, or my teacher made a mistake, but it seems it was most of the worlds coal; not oil, that came from all the piles of trees from that period.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
on 25 May 15:24
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Correct. In theory, we could make more oil in the lab. We cannot make more coal, because the wood will get broken down by bacteria far before it turns to peat, lignite, sub-bituminous, or bituminous coal, and much less anthracite.
DancingBear@midwest.social
on 25 May 12:13
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Cool
InverseParallax@lemmy.world
on 25 May 06:05
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Oil was effectively plankton and other sea stuff.
Coal was forests.
Child_of_the_bukkake@lemmy.cafe
on 27 May 14:18
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Brother I finally found you.
We come from the same place you and me. Remember that barn?
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
on 25 May 17:48
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Yes. I made mention of this in a reply to someone else as well. I’m not sure if my teacher (like 30 years ago) told us wrong or if I simply remembered it wrong.
stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net
on 25 May 11:27
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I imagine dead trees were flammable, even back then. And oxygen levels were 15% higher. Can you imagine the forest fires?
And after it was invented, it was only in black and white until the 1950s
turtlesareneat@discuss.online
on 25 May 12:45
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Mushrooms are the great undertaker, the great decomposer. The Langoliers. They are just waiting to eat you, and they’re happy to share their fruits in the meantime. They’re fattening you up. They can wait.
ShimmeringKoi@hexbear.net
on 25 May 03:23
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Its basically just the best way to be a large plant if you’re not gonna be a big parasitic ivy. Once your plant circulatory system gets complex enough to send stuff further away, you start getting big enough that you need hard tissues just to stop yourself from folding over.
I’d argue, but I agree. I don’t need to know how they look, if they’re a billion years and capable of communicating, whatever state they’re in looks good. Even if its a fungus posessed rot monster.
So if you look at a tiny blade of grass and a gigantic tree its like looking at a Chihuahua and a brachiosaurus. And there are smaller things and bigger things in the aminal kingdum!
Sir_Simon_Spamalot@lemmy.world
on 26 May 05:54
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It’s also mindblowing that chihuahua and tibetan mastiff belong to the same species even tho they look entirely different.
no, we didn’t have mice and also ants evolve into humans… there’s one distinct line of ancestors…
it’s called convergent evolution. check out wikipedia
TacoButtPlug@sh.itjust.works
on 25 May 23:34
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I wasn’t ready for how weird this comment section turned out to be…
Or maybe the microorganisms and food sources that life forms are exposed to have more of an effect on how the macroorganisms evolve than is currently talked about, which would explain why so many things in similar environments evolve similar traits.
theres also a definition of a what a tree in the sense , its develops wood, many things are tree like, but not trees: such as palms(just overgrown herbs), dracaena( aka cabbage tree, they have something dracenoid thickining.) extinct plants like giant lycophytes and ferns
JackbyDev@programming.dev
on 26 May 06:53
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As far as they are all vascular plants, but that’s like, basically everything that isn’t moss iirc.
The evolution of wood is common because it’s simple for cellulose to get denser in response to a need to grow taller to outcompete your neighbors.
JackbyDev@programming.dev
on 26 May 18:59
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So trees are the “evolve to crabs” meme and wood is like a crab shell. Or, I guess just exoskeleton, because things that aren’t crabs also have hard shells.
Kinda! But the shell isn’t what the carcinization memes are referring to. I’d say the biggest part of carcinization is the loss of crustacean tails. Basically every false crab is in the process of losing their tail in favor of a rounder body plan
wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
on 26 May 22:01
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I was under the impression that structural lignin was what really made trees a viable style of growth, and that seems like an odd chemical for a bunch of unrelated plants to all evolve. Is there something I’m missing? Is lignin actually present in all vascular plants?
I wasn’t being specific enough. Cell walls in plants are composed of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. Lignin IS one of the structural polymers that plants produce, and yea, every single vascular plant has and uses lignin to provide structure. Iirc its a polymer produced by every plant, including mosses and other nonvascular plants, it’s just not used to the same extent.
wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
on 29 May 20:52
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AH, I see. So, it already existed, but until trees evolved, it wasn’t used to such an extreme extent.
Yea, the evolution of vascularity in plants let them get off the ground in the first place (meaning being taller than a few inches). Vascularity is the first big jump plants made after leaving the water. From there, being taller means outcompeting your neighbors and spreading your babies further. When you have that double whammy of more food + more babies, you get a selective pressure for taller that never really goes away. This is why multiple families have species that have arborized and have continuously done so over their evolutionary history. If the niche is empty, something will jump into it, often sooner rather than later (on a deep time scale) which is basically the whole idea of convergent evolution as a whole.
andybytes@programming.dev
on 26 May 07:03
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threaded - newest
.
So crabapple trees…?
evolution intensifies
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/6ed8ca5f-3610-4a20-be01-6785ade8d7c9.jpeg">
Nature likes things that turn hard- Wait what?
Weren’t there like, several millions of years where trees evolved but nothing had come yet to break down wood, so like, generations of dead forest just fell on top of each other until some fungus was like “that looks yummy”?
The molecule is called lignin. And yes, there was a good 60 million years before that particular problem was cracked.
Next is plastics
First, we bio-engineer bacteria and fungi to prefer plastic as food.
Second, these bacteria become a serious endopathogen in the human body while scavenging our precious bodily microplastics.
Third, we engineer a bacteriophage to attack the bacteria in our brains.
Fourth…
The whole human comedy just keeps going and going
The beautiful part is that when wintertime rolls around the gorillas simply freeze to death
Exactly the reference I thought of reading this
I know an old woman who swallowed a fly…
Yes, that’s when coal comes from. There were giant global fire storms, because of all the dead trees and also because there was more oxygen. The oxygen also caused insects to become gigantic. They don’t have lungs, just random holes in their body so the airs oxygen content limits their size.
Yes, that is how we got coal.
we’re living through a similar period but with plastics :)
It’s the circle of life. Plastics are a petrochemical, and those trees created our coal.
Now plastics weren’t technically evolved (unless you count human evolution)…but at least we got CRISPR to maybe speed things along with “evolving” a plastics predator.
i dont really know why human activity should be special. it’s evolved creatures doing weird shit, producing (temporarily?) undigestible stuff. there’s no rule saying you cant have the production outside your body, it’s just customary to use organs.
u might be onto something, this thread sent me down the rabbit hole and penises have evolved independently at least 6 times
Had to look it up because I didnt beleive
sure enough its correct
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree
Something poetic and quaint about a link to a Wikipedia article titled “Tree”
reddit has broken me. I was expecting it to point to weed.
Here you go.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree
Reddit has broken me. I was expecting a rickroll
sooo glad I wasn’t alone.
anyhow, here’s a fun song.
I was expecting an undirected acyclic graph.
Yo momma so fat she sat on a binary tree and squashed it into a linked list in O(1) time.
That happens to me constantly
is a binary tree equivalent to a 2D KD-tree ?
Scishow had an episode about it a week ago. It’s a strategy, not a species.
I want to be a tree too when I grow up!
I thought crab-like animals were all actually pretty closely related to each other, i.e. all crab-like animals are arthropods, which is a less broad category (despite the incredibly huge amount of species in it) than ‘all plants that can form a wooden trunk’. Any taxonomists here to confirm/deny?
Things have independently evolved into crabs like five times or something
Yes, but I think OP’s point is those 5-6 crab-events all came from a narrow taxonomic group. All plant families have some trees. Only one sub-group of animals contains crabs.
It is as if all trees only came from members of the lily family.
The future is gonna be tree with crabs…
Land will be trees, beaches will be crabs, and I’ve heard oceans will be nothing but jellyfish
Fish too
That makes sense. And I feel like it makes me understand trees better. This is what I’m thinking.
The fitness landscape for a moving creature underwater is pretty limited. You gotta be hydrodynamic and there aren’t many solutions to that. But we still get variety; eels and jellyfish, for example.
With plants you also have some strong limitations. Plants don’t move. They’re rooted to the ground. Plus they compete over height. So, the solution set consists of sturdy and tall trees.
Moving creatures on land have a lot of more options so evolution achieved more variety. I’m not sure if distinct branches of moving creatures on land arrived at the “same” evolutionary solution.
Trees are tall because trees are tall.
And it’s not even one creature or even type of creature. Look up rhizobium.
Tbf, as we learn more about our gut microbiomes, it turns out that humans are that way as well. Maybe that’s why we have the thoughts in our heads vs. the feelings in our guts… (no that’s actually not it at all, except… isn’t it though?).
I figure the feeling of being in your head is simply due to your eyeballs being located there. Now I want to put a 3d camera on my hips, and steam it to VR goggles.
The hips do not lie. Ipso facto, you would be seeing ultimate truth.
It turns out that the meaning of life is at crotch level.
Something, something, biology.
So now I actually think this idea is on to something brilliant. I have been diving into neuroscience lately and this sounds like an amazing experimental method.
It’s like non-surgically transplanting your eyes into your hips. Why do that? To further refine brain-body mapping.
We turn our head instinctively to aid vision. Once our brain realizes that visual input improves only when we move our hips, body awareness will shift significantly.
@DoubleSpace@lemm.ee the best ideas start as jokes
If a future VR is strong enough to embody us in another body — an animal, a conjured crazy creature, whatever — would we eventually “learn” it? Move around in it? Be it? I feel like the answer is yes.
The body is the mind. Change your body, change your mind.
Just saying, polymorph spells are problematic.
I agree with this. But surely there has to be a limit. If we create an extremely complex body where its movement requires solving rhythmic problems based on changing prime numbers, or something like that, would we be able to do it? If we hook up the VR to a squirrel to control a human body, would it be able to do it?
Microphones and headphones too.
People have experimented with that sort of thing. Here’s a DIY for going into 3rd person mode using a camera on a stick and some electronics in a backpack. Bit of googling also finds me body swap experiments, but nothing on a crotch perspective.
Awesome resource, thank you for posting it.
Here’s one reason why a hip level perspective would be so helpful as a neuroscience tool. It is an ethical and reversible experimental intervention that could add real experimental power to functional brain-body mapping.
Combine the perspective shift induced by the virtual rearrangement of sensory input with fNIRS for cortical imaging, perhaps before, during and after the hip-view experience. A company focused on near infrared cortical imaging products
I am certain a proper neuroscientist could come up with even better and more detailed questions to ask using the method.
Something like this could even be used as a therapy tool for trauma, perhaps, once the impact of the perspective shifts were understood well. A common trauma response is dissociation and common therapy methods include ways to help people reconnect with their whole bodies again.
Heh, branch
tbf isn’t a tree just a plant but big? makes sense that any plant species can evolve into a tree just by getting bigger
Well there are certain features needed for a plant to get that big. So those features had to evolve independently each time which is a bit interesting. Wood is the famous example.
fair enough
Oh, to be as famous as wood
It’s better than bad, it’s good!
Yeah, like monocots don’t have secondary growth so they have to use some tricks to get that large. Like palms first grow to a certain stem size on the ground (or below) and only then grow up. I wonder how lycopods grew that large considering they are not really ferns even… Oh and ferns also can grow to be trees!
I think it’s more complicated than that. For example, bamboo “trees” are actually in the grass family.
huh I never considered bamboo to be a tree in the first place
Yeah? So are palms trees
Its called convergent evolution and you also have some shit you wouldnt believe that makes all apes similar to us.
Well humans are a type of great ape, sooooll
I’m more of a middling ape myself honestly
Look we cannot compare outselves to the gorilla gorilla, they are the greatest ape, but that does not mean you are not also great
Hit me. I love evolutionary fun facts.
smackkk
Apes are so similar to us because we came from a common ancestor. I’d love to hear if there are traits we evolved independently after we split though.
Unsurpassable power: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crabtree
The absolute peak of evolution. Everyone, go home.
Good moaning!
Now we just need crabs to evolve a treecrab and we can have the two battle for the ultimate life form
Not to be confused with Dryococelus aka the “tree lobster”
here’s a cool blog post that expands on this There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
i didn’t even put it in a bookmark folder, it’s just loose on my bookmark bar because it’s such an interesting post that i reread from time to time
Maybe…but I doubt many of these phylogenies use DNA, and if so, likely only a single or few genes. Nowhere near enough resolution to accurately determine genetic relatedness. Woody plants may actually be more related than we think.
These sorts of phylogenies tend to use morphological characteristics which is an unreliable measure of genetic relatedness.
I will stand corrected if wrong though
That was a very fun and interesting reading! Thanks for sharing
Very cool read, thank you
My sister in law recently quipped that “Trees are a social construct” and at first I thought she was just being glib but now I can’t get that statement out of my head.
I listen to a podcast called Completely Arbortrary. They talk about a different tree species each episode. They say trees are a strategy, not a strict definition.
Thanks! Just subscribed. See they have a couple Metasequoia episodes -a favorite of mine .
So that’s why every stargate planet looks like Canada
🤣🤣🤣
Sadly Lemmy isn’t big enough to support niche communities, but I really enjoyed r/unexpectedstargate back in the day.
Isn’t big enough yet ❤️
That and every Stargate planet is Vancouver
Its trees and crabs all the way down.
Also, no such thing as fish.
Google it.
Impossible. If there were no such thing as fish, how could bees be fish?
I don’t have the tools to know how to respond to this comment. You win.
Edit: Holy shit. I just did a quick google. Boydster is not shitting us. Just google “bees are fish.” Oddly enough, this actually furthers the thesis of fish not existing.
To add on for anyone who is lazy like me, the thing where Google summarizes says California has classified bees as fish under an environmental protection act. According to the first result (Reddit) it’s because fish is a catch all term in that law. Instead of listing all the animals they just use fish. Because fish,bees, and the other animals are all invertebrates.
Now whoever reads this has three Lemmy comments, a reddit thread reference, and an ai overview reference as some solid sources
What a nicely packaged little subthread to come across while decompressing after a super busy day, lol!
Fish are vertebrates they have a backbone
Fish are vertebrates they have a backbone
Some fish are, yeah
Sorry bro, all fish are vertebrates
While I understand it is an arbitrary classification system designed by humans, one of the defining factors of fish is that they are vertebrates.
What about starfishes? Checkmate.
That made me chuckle, but because this is a science meme forum, I will just clarify that starfish are not fish.
Source?
Because all the sources I’ve come across say that “fish” is not a monophylatic classification and is essentially arbitrary.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish
… and Wikipedia states that the category of “fish” is paraphylatic, meaning that it is defined by convention rather than ‘fact’ and its boundaries can be argued, since it excludes some of the descendants of fish.
also, as pointed out by another commenter, we use the word fish to describe lots of things that are not included in this definition, like starfish and crayfish.
So you’re suggesting that because we all evolved from a sesspool swamp we are all fish?
I’m down
Trees also do not have a real definition. But you think you know what a tree is.
Fish have a more strict definition than trees.
I provided you a source please name a fish that is an invertebrate or what not that is really cool and has the backbone in some other genetically cool place
Having recently learned about trees, I actually don’t think I know what a tree is. at least, not enough to create a reasonable, non-blurry definition of “tree.”
You’ve defined fish as being vertebrates, and as such I cannot find an invertebrate that fits that definition. But what you can’t do is just say the word “fish” and expect me to know what you mean - you have to provide a definition, and I could provide a different definition in a different context and neither of us would really be “wrong.”
If you did just say “fish” without providing a definition, I would be tempted to either exclude sharks or include crabs, depending on context.
Sharks are fish I believe but I am not the one making the definitions. Wikipedia / fish …
This is the best way I’ve ever seen utter befuddlement expressed. Chapeau!
Beavers are also fish.
This is like the whole, “triceratops didn’t exist, it’s just a young Torosaurus” thing all over again. My world can’t handle this!
Then what are the dolphins thankful for?
A large variety of aquatic phylogeny that is edible and nutritious for a carnivorous aquatic mammalian diet.
Admittedly it’s going to be harder to put into a show tune, but I’m sure they’ll come up with some catchy names.
The genus Cornus is a huge middle finger to growth-form-based taxonomy. It contains dogwood trees and also bunchberry, an itty bitty herb that grows on the forest floor.
The first “trees” were also lycopods whose closest extant relatives are the club mosses, a name which gives you an idea of how big they get. All the coal in the world is from a period where plants figured out wood before decomposers learned how to break it down and is mainly the result of a bunch of lycopod trunks sinking into peat bugs and slowly getting compressed.
We use a specific type of Lycopodium as a control group to calculate pollen counts and various other metrics in palaeoecology. It’s pollen is super distinct.
<img alt="" src="https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/5474421f-98ac-418b-bb63-db90a80e7285.jpeg">
That’s super neat. Is that little triangular bit at the top a germ pore or something else? It’s funny how you get one clade that takes what you’d think would be a really optimizable form like a spore or a pollen grain and takes a left turn with it. In fungi, Entolomas are really identifiable because their spores are pink and cube shaped.
<img alt="" src="https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/15a9ae88-7a7e-4848-a6bd-be0ee1c66e6a.png">
The Y like structure comes from their formation in a sort of honeycomb cluster of 4. This structure makes them easy to break off from the host and also provides a weak point for germination. :) I wish I could differentiate fungal spores, I see a lot of them.
Oof, I do not envy anyone trying to identify fungi through the fossil record. Color and fruiting body structure tend to play pretty big roles in ID because the spores themselves tend to be small and fragile, so except for a few genera that are known for highly ornamented spores it can be pretty challenging.
Also cool that for a period of like 60 million years, nothing decomposed dead trees. As they would die or fall over, they’d just stay there, piling up. This is where most oil came from. The massive amounts of trees stacking up before bacteria and fungus evolved to decomposed them. Imagine 60 million years worth of trees just lying around.
*Thought I’d add an edit, since this post got quite a few eyes on it: It was mostly coal that all those trees turned into. Not oil.
I love this fact, and am curious where you learned it?
I learned it nearly 30 years ago in school. I just did a search and found a link about it, though.
Also, seems that either I remembered wrongly, or my teacher made a mistake, but it seems it was most of the worlds coal; not oil, that came from all the piles of trees from that period.
thorogood.co.uk/treevolution-how-trees-came-first…
Correct. In theory, we could make more oil in the lab. We cannot make more coal, because the wood will get broken down by bacteria far before it turns to peat, lignite, sub-bituminous, or bituminous coal, and much less anthracite.
Didn’t those trees become coal, not oil?
I think near water they became oil and far from water they became coal
No, most coal comes from plants in swamps, because the water helped preserve the organic matter.
Plants in swamps die -> organic matter on the bottom of the swamp -> peat -> brown coal -> black coal.
Oil apparently comes mostly from plankton.
On the different origins: carboeurope.org/how-are-fossil-fuels-formed-the-s…
Cool
Oil was effectively plankton and other sea stuff.
Coal was forests.
Brother I finally found you.
We come from the same place you and me. Remember that barn?
Yes. I made mention of this in a reply to someone else as well. I’m not sure if my teacher (like 30 years ago) told us wrong or if I simply remembered it wrong.
I imagine dead trees were flammable, even back then. And oxygen levels were 15% higher. Can you imagine the forest fires?
.
Fire wasn’t invented back then
And after it was invented, it was only in black and white until the 1950s
Mushrooms are the great undertaker, the great decomposer. The Langoliers. They are just waiting to eat you, and they’re happy to share their fruits in the meantime. They’re fattening you up. They can wait.
That Langoliers reference spotted in the wild!
Now we do the dance of joy!
I remember a flimsy tv film with even flimsier CGI spherical creatures eating the planet
I was struggling to explain the plot of this one to my gf just the other day. Had to pull out screenshots of the TV movie to make it make sense.
I thought that was coal
Its basically just the best way to be a large plant if you’re not gonna be a big parasitic ivy. Once your plant circulatory system gets complex enough to send stuff further away, you start getting big enough that you need hard tissues just to stop yourself from folding over.
Trees are like every other plant, ONLY MORE SO
I’m a billion years, crabs will start turning into trees and trees into crabs. merging into the ubercreature
you may not like it but Ms Crabtree is what peak performance looks like
Damn. You look good for your age.
I’d argue, but I agree. I don’t need to know how they look, if they’re a billion years and capable of communicating, whatever state they’re in looks good. Even if its a fungus posessed rot monster.
Like a tree, for example.
I wish, I’m only a crab, trying to become a tree
“ubercreature” excuse me, lichen would like a word with you
lichen is the shit
appreciate when a symbiote becomes it’s own thing.
the tree of life isn’t meant to merge branches,
Eukaryotes, corals, lychens, probably the same with chlorophyll.
I imagine it’ll look like paras
Paras is a fungus. Totally different thing.
Ah you’re right. Torterra then
Torterra is a tortoise. Totally different thing.
Maybe Pantera?
Pantera is large cats
I think palm trees are a kind of grass
I’m firmly in this camp.
I didn’t know that and I agree
So is corn
And banana
And bamboo
Same for roots, btw, just earlier.
So if you look at a tiny blade of grass and a gigantic tree its like looking at a Chihuahua and a brachiosaurus. And there are smaller things and bigger things in the aminal kingdum!
It’s also mindblowing that chihuahua and tibetan mastiff belong to the same species even tho they look entirely different.
also that humans did that is wild
There are fern trees, conifer trees, and flowering trees. Where are my moss trees?
gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org/…/dendroideum/
inaturalist.org/…/204198-Dendrolycopodium-obscuru…
Except clubmoss isn’t moss iirc? They’re vascular and more of a fern than moss.
Shhhh hahaha
By the logic we are not humans…
no, we didn’t have mice and also ants evolve into humans… there’s one distinct line of ancestors…
it’s called convergent evolution. check out wikipedia
I wasn’t ready for how weird this comment section turned out to be…
Based on your username, you should be used to weird shit.
Doesn’t mean I can’t still be awe’d though!
Or maybe the microorganisms and food sources that life forms are exposed to have more of an effect on how the macroorganisms evolve than is currently talked about, which would explain why so many things in similar environments evolve similar traits.
Arborization !
theres also a definition of a what a tree in the sense , its develops wood, many things are tree like, but not trees: such as palms(just overgrown herbs), dracaena( aka cabbage tree, they have something dracenoid thickining.) extinct plants like giant lycophytes and ferns
Are at least all woody plants related?
As far as they are all vascular plants, but that’s like, basically everything that isn’t moss iirc.
The evolution of wood is common because it’s simple for cellulose to get denser in response to a need to grow taller to outcompete your neighbors.
So trees are the “evolve to crabs” meme and wood is like a crab shell. Or, I guess just exoskeleton, because things that aren’t crabs also have hard shells.
Kinda! But the shell isn’t what the carcinization memes are referring to. I’d say the biggest part of carcinization is the loss of crustacean tails. Basically every false crab is in the process of losing their tail in favor of a rounder body plan
I was under the impression that structural lignin was what really made trees a viable style of growth, and that seems like an odd chemical for a bunch of unrelated plants to all evolve. Is there something I’m missing? Is lignin actually present in all vascular plants?
I wasn’t being specific enough. Cell walls in plants are composed of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. Lignin IS one of the structural polymers that plants produce, and yea, every single vascular plant has and uses lignin to provide structure. Iirc its a polymer produced by every plant, including mosses and other nonvascular plants, it’s just not used to the same extent.
AH, I see. So, it already existed, but until trees evolved, it wasn’t used to such an extreme extent.
Yea, the evolution of vascularity in plants let them get off the ground in the first place (meaning being taller than a few inches). Vascularity is the first big jump plants made after leaving the water. From there, being taller means outcompeting your neighbors and spreading your babies further. When you have that double whammy of more food + more babies, you get a selective pressure for taller that never really goes away. This is why multiple families have species that have arborized and have continuously done so over their evolutionary history. If the niche is empty, something will jump into it, often sooner rather than later (on a deep time scale) which is basically the whole idea of convergent evolution as a whole.
Well, I’m just a product of my environment.
I always liked the idea of being a tree like life form.
Imagine looking down at a bunch of cute little things crawling all over you for hundreds of years and then one day one of them shows up with an axe
Concentrated sun energy sinks