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Plants repeatedly got rid of their ability to obtain their own nitrogen
- jmccarthy 8y agoFava beans! Easy to grow, fun to watch, nice flowers, tasty, and big nitrogen nodules.
- reificator 8y agoPlus they pair well with a nice chianti.
- DmenshunlAnlsis 8y agoAlthough it’s worth pointing out that about 1 in 10 people suffer from Favism (1),which is sort of rough. 1. Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, leading to hemolytic anemia.
- steve_adams_86 8y agoA fun thing about them (in the PNW at least) is that you can plant piles of them in fall and they will grow with very little assistance (or watering since it rains so much) and you'll have heaps upon heaps of beans in spring. I planted $10 of Windsor beans 2 years ago and ended up drying about 300-400 seeds (far more than $10 worth) and still had too many to eat. Some of my new son's first solid food was a hummus made from those same dried beans (really delicious!). Such a fun plant to grow. Processing the beans is a bit of work, but wow, it's worth it. Unparalleled flavour in the bean kingdom.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y agoWhere do you buy some? There's a little playground behind my building with a few trees and I'd love to add some plants and see them grow eventually.
- bitwize 8y agoThe ability to synthesize compounds is often lost when those compounds abound in the organism's environment because synthesis consumes energy and an organism's energy budget is limited. Examples from the animal kingdom include frugivorous humans lacking the ability to synthesize vitamin C, and cats lacking the ability to synthesize taurine.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> cats lacking the ability to synthesize taurine Where, in the wild, do find their plentiful taurine?
- drb91 8y agoSmall mammals!
- saalweachter 8y agoAnd birds and insects!
- basementcat 8y agoCHEEZBURGRZ
- your-nanny 8y agoNitrogen is usually a limiting factor, but freeloading is often a viable strategy if there is a cost involved.
- delbel 8y agoI'm going to take a wild guess and say that this is due to low CO2 levels. Plants evolved and are use to 1200ppm CO2 level. The current levels 300-400ppm 1/4 to 1/3 of their normal level, they are starving. Its amazing they are actually surviving. Probably going to get downvoted to hell but science is science.
- Terr_ 8y ago
- oever 8y agoYay for outsourcing.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago> "Use it or lose it" applies to genes as much as (or maybe even more than) anything else. Genes involved in biological processes are lost if the trait they confer is unused or unnecessary." Why would this be true? Can't a gene be dormant? Or perhaps over-ridden but another gene or genes? Or is, over the long haul (read: __many__) years any and all genes will naturally mutate (that is, be lost). Then if the "replacement" is more advantageous, the replacement will persist. Fair enough. But that's not use it / lose it per se. It's still in use, but less so (and is over time replaced).
- vertexFarm 8y agoWhile you make a significant distinction in that evolution does not necessarily make a decision to eliminate unused traits, most traits that consume resources and energy do get culled as it almost universally improves survivability. After all, one of the things that's so hard for us to grok about evolution is that it's not a goal-oriented process in any way. It's not engineering, it's the process of random chance and what can persist. For example, a lot of people think that all our junk DNA actually does something profound and important, and while some of it probably does have a purpose we don't yet understand, I think it's almost certain that any process that makes a bunch of random decisions that are mindlessly culled by environmental forces will inevitably generate some flotsam and noise in its code. It's kind of like training AI; it definitely won't give you the most minimalist method of carrying out that task, but it will eventually find some way to carry it out. Almost as a brutal, automatic tropism.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoYes. I agree. My issue was with the phrase "use it, or lose it." As you said there's plenty of "left over" genes. They're not lost. What's happened is their traits have been replaced by a more advantageous trait. The former might still be useful, but the latter are more so and become the majority, so to speak.
- hinkley 8y agoThe “survival of the fittest” phrase is a huge disservice to generations of students. Traits that are maladaptive are culled. Ones that have no effect are preserved, increased or diluted depending entirely on what other genes they appear with. Not the gene themselves. If pale eyes were not beneficial in northern latitudes, we would still have blue eyes because the norsemen had them, and they were very successful. That gene will stick around until something forces it out of the pool because there is otherwise nothing to stop it.
- anomaloustho 8y agoHow do non-symbiotic plants normally process their nitrogen into ammonia? Article didn’t mention.
- undersuit 8y agoAmmonia and other nitrogen containing molecules are already in soils in varying quantities and are taken up by the roots like other nutrients.
- hinkley 8y agoThis article is showing its biases. You only need to fix nitrogen in a monoculture, and rather than giving up on that idea they’re going to keep trying to make plants that are everything to everyone. If your ecosystem contains nitrogen fixers you can scavenge nitrogen from your neighbors. In some cases this could be construed as a second symbiosis: A vining legume is working with the bacteria for nitrogen and its neighbors for loft. It has access to more sunlight in the spring, and can lay down more nitrogen before the trees wake up. At which point the trees have access to more nitrogen for manufacturing leaves.
- perpetualcrayon 8y agoTo my way of thinking, this makes a ton of sense. I don't think Darwin got it right. It's not "survival of the fittest". It's "survival of that which can find its place in an ecosystem".
- 5DFractalTetris 8y agoI think it's "Survival of the Fittest Ecosystem," actually. So not like, "Humans are fittest," but instead, "Human eating corn cow sheep soy etc. while building machines is fittest"
- eternauta3k 8y agoIt's interesting how selection acts at different levels. Individuals are reasonably good at enslaving their cells so they cooperate (when they don't, they get cancer). But cooperation between individuals is much less effective, not to mention between species. An ecosystem is incapable of enforcing a contract between species to prevent a selfish species from destroying the whole thing.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y agoThat's basically what it meant in the first place. It's "fittest" in the older and broader sense of "fit": suitability for a task, role, or purpose.
- buzzword 8y agoOrganisms increase biodiversity of commensual flora and fauna this way. It's probably why the human body dropped furry skin but shortly thereafter got domesticated sheep and cattle, and all their myriad benefits
- strait 8y agoCouldn't it be as simple as as a selection of ample seed production over ample nitrogen availability in an environment where adequate sunlight was more often a limiting factor than adequate nitrogen. It takes significant energy to produce the root exudates that encourage and feed the specialized symbiotic bacteria that will fix some amount of nitrogen for the roots. The plant already needs lots of energy to build it's carbon structure and immune system. Then more energy for seed production, which is the most important of all. This energy has to come from sunlight. In growing competition with other taller plants and trees, sunlight is often greatly diminished. The plants that 'stopped' producing these exudates and used the available energy in structural fitness / robust seed production were able to compete more effectively as a species over a larger area.
- SomewhatLikely 8y agoI wonder if the symbiotic bacteria provide other benefits, such as fighting off other bacteria that would attack the plant.
- rdtsc 8y agoI wasn't taking too much care of the grass and fertilizing it and after a few years I started seeing more and more clover. It turns out clover fixates nitrogen from the air. The clover took over in some areas almost completely. After a while I started liking how clover looked.
- dmurray 8y agoThis happens on my parents' lawn too. I don't understand though, if grass grows better than clover in nitrogen-rich soil, why doesn't the grass come back once the clover has replenished the nitrogen?
- mikekchar 8y agoIf you overseed with grass seed it will. Grass and clover makes a really nice sward. When I had a lawn (more than 10 years ago!), I eventually realised the beauty of this. Mix in camomile for an even lusher, softer lawn. Let it grow long enough for the clover and camomile to flower and it's amazing. The longer grown inhibits other weeds. It's practically maintenance free -- just run over it with a push mower every once in a while.
- bainsfather 8y agoOn farmland, the nitrogen from the clover reaches the grass after it has been eaten by sheep/cows and then excreted - either directly or by the farmer spreading manure.
- rumcajz 8y agoThis may be an evolutionary stable strategy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy). If nitrgoen-fixating species already cover N% of the niche, other species may not be pressed too hard to retain their own nitrogen-fixing ability.