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“If you explained trees to someone who’d never heard of them—towers that drink through their feet, turn light into food, and whisper through fungal cables—they’
by gigatree 2y ago
“If you explained trees to someone who’d never heard of them—towers that drink through their feet, turn light into food, and whisper through fungal cables—they’d think it’s the craziest tech ever invented.” Add this to the list
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI was surprised to learn that two randomly selected trees are not likely to be more closely related than any two other randomly selected plants. They're not a family but rather a strategy that evolution has rediscovered several times separately. If there is light-powered life on other planets, it has probably figured out how to tree also.
- xandrius 2y agoDo you mean 2 randomly selected trees for the same specie? Otherwise that statement is not surprising at all.
- shwaj 2y agoIt’s somewhat surprising to me. If you take any two furry animals, they are more closely related to each other than to a lizard.
- i_cannot_hack 2y agoNot really true. Kiwi birds are very furry (unless you define furry as having mammalian hair, which sort of defeats the point) and are more related to lizards than to mammals.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoRight, that was my thinking. Though frequently incorrect, it is intuitive that similar things are more closely related than dissimilar thing.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoWell no, 2 randomly selected trees for the same species are quite likely to have a recent common ancestor (contrasted with, say, a tree and fish) because they're the same species. I was under the mistaken impression that "tree" was a phylogenetic thing. Like, they're all descended from some distant great-grandmother-tree or something. The surprising thing was that this is not the case, and many separate species have all discovered how to tree individually.
- renewiltord 2y agoWell, I suppose the more striking statement is that you can find two trees and two bushes such that there is a tree/bush pair that is closer related than the tree/tree pair. Ginkgo biloba (Ginkgo/Maidenhair Tree) https://www.vdberk.com/trees/ginkgo-biloba-mascia/ https://www.vdberk.com/trees/ginkgo-biloba-mascia/ Pinus strobus (White Pine) https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=PIST https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=PIST Ephedra sinica (Chinese Ephedra/Ma Huang) https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/135489-Ephedra-sinica https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/135489-Ephedra-sinica Juniperus horizontalis (Creeping Juniper) https://www.gardenia.net/plant/juniperus-horizontalis-blue-chip https://www.gardenia.net/plant/juniperus-horizontalis-blue-c... I think visually the first two look alike and the last two look alike. I would phenotypically bucket them together. But the reality of genetic relation is different.
- viggity 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution
- BobaFloutist 2y agoThere was a huge revolution in understanding taxonomy when we started actually genetically testing various organisms. Before then, we had to categorize things based on the fossil record and based on similar structures, but it turns out a lot of very similar looking things aren't actually more related to each other than they are to very dissimilar looking things. I do think there's an argument to be made that there should be a paradigm that describe organisms that are functionally the same within an ecosystem but genetically quite different other than "convergent evolution."
- heyjamesknight 2y agoI think the paradigm you're looking for is Plato's Theory of the Forms. Half-joking.
- BobaFloutist 2y agoI just think that while it's scientifically fascinating, and great as a fun fact to say "There's no such thing as trees actually, they're just related to various other plants" and "There's no such thing as fish, actually, they're all related to different other species" it's also useful to have a word that refers to all tall, woody plants or all gilled-vertebrates. Either way, better Plato than Pliny.
- jacobolus 2y agoThe word "fish" historically meant more or less any animal in the sea, which to my understanding included whales, seals, sea turtles, shrimp, shellfish, starfish, jellyfish, etc. Phylogenetically, there is also a relevant group, but we call them "chordates" instead.
- cultofmetatron 2y ago>"There's no such thing as fish" fun fact, your average bony fish is more closely related to us than it is to a shark
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
- WorkerBee28474 2y agoThere's a lot we don't know about what life would look like on other planets, but there would be trees and there would be crabs.
- Ericson2314 2y ago> They're not a family but rather a strategy that evolution has rediscovered several times separately. I don't think that is true. My understanding would be more "all angiosperms are trees, and the ones that aren't woody are sort of doing a neoteny. They still usually have "latent tree genes", and so it fairly "easy" to evolve back and forth between small herb and big tree.
- sfn42 2y agoTrees essentially just pump water out of the ground and up to their leaves where it evaporates. They're like big natural humidifiers.
- cenamus 2y agoBut also through insane negative pressures, otherwise they'd only get water up ~10m
- novia 2y ago> whisper through fungal cables the wood wide web isn't real
- Metacelsus 2y agoyup. https://undark.org/2023/05/25/where-the-wood-wide-web-narrative-went-wrong/ https://undark.org/2023/05/25/where-the-wood-wide-web-narrat...
- m463 2y agotall redwoods also drink fog through their face (leaves and bark)
- quesera 2y agoTrees also consume air to grow (they add mass primarily by extracting carbon from CO₂).