• Anomalocaris@lemm.ee
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    1 hour ago

    I’m a billion years, crabs will start turning into trees and trees into crabs. merging into the ubercreature

  • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 hours ago

    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.

  • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    4 hours ago

    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.

      • NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        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.

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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          57 minutes ago

          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!

        • Devmapall@lemm.ee
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          5 hours ago

          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

  • Deconceptualist@lemm.ee
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    7 hours ago

    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
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      5 hours ago

      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.

      • SOB_Van_Owen@lemm.ee
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        2 hours ago

        Thanks! Just subscribed. See they have a couple Metasequoia episodes -a favorite of mine .

  • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    5 hours ago

    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.

    • bananabenana@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      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

  • DeathsEmbrace@lemm.ee
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    8 hours ago

    Its called convergent evolution and you also have some shit you wouldnt believe that makes all apes similar to us.

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      10 hours ago

      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
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        10 hours ago

        The molecule is called lignin. And yes, there was a good 60 million years before that particular problem was cracked.

          • meyotch@slrpnk.net
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            9 hours ago

            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

      • woodenghost [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        8 hours ago

        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.

  • OpenStars@discuss.online
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    9 hours ago

    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?).

    • DoubleSpace@lemm.ee
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      9 hours ago

      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.

      • meyotch@slrpnk.net
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        9 hours ago

        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.

          • meyotch@slrpnk.net
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            8 hours ago

            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
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              3 hours ago

              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.