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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Had to look it up because I didnt beleive
sure enough its correct
https://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.
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.
Didn't those trees become coal, not oil?
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.
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: https://www.carboeurope.org/how-are-fossil-fuels-formed-the-science-behind-oil-coal-and-natural-gas/
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?
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 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
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.
https://www.thorogood.co.uk/treevolution-how-trees-came-first-and-rot-came-later-in-earths-deep-past/
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.
I'm a billion years, crabs will start turning into trees and trees into crabs. merging into the ubercreature
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
Maybe Pantera?
Pantera is large cats
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
That was a very fun and interesting reading! Thanks for sharing
Very cool read, thank you
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
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 is how we got coal.
u might be onto something, this thread sent me down the rabbit hole and penises have evolved independently at least 6 times
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
🤣🤣🤣
I think palm trees are a kind of grass
I didn’t know that and I agree
So is corn
And banana
And bamboo
I'm firmly in this camp.
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
Some fish are, yeah
What about starfishes? Checkmate.
Source?
Because all the sources I've come across say that "fish" is not a monophylatic classification and is essentially arbitrary.
What a nicely packaged little subthread to come across while decompressing after a super busy day, lol!
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.
So crabapple trees...?
evolution intensifies
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 .
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.
Hit me. I love evolutionary fun facts.
smackkk
Well humans are a type of great ape, sooooll
Unsurpassable power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crabtree
The absolute peak of evolution. Everyone, go home.
Good moaning!
Not to be confused with Dryococelus aka the "tree lobster"
Same for roots, btw, just earlier.
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.
@[email protected] the best ideas start as jokes
The body is the mind. Change your body, change your mind.
Just saying, polymorph spells are problematic.
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.
Microphones and headphones too.
There are fern trees, conifer trees, and flowering trees. Where are my moss trees?
https://gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org/species/dendrolycopodium/dendroideum/
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/204198-Dendrolycopodium-obscurum
Except clubmoss isn't moss iirc? They're vascular and more of a fern than moss.
Shhhh hahaha
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
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!
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.
Oh, to be as famous as wood
It's better than bad, it's good!
fair enough
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.
Yeah? So are palms trees
huh I never considered bamboo to be a tree in the first place
Arborization !
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
Trees are like every other plant, ONLY MORE SO
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
Heh, branch
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.
Concentrated sun energy sinks
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
I want to be a tree too when I grow up!
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.
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.
By the logic we are not humans...