• Ledericas@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    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

  • stebo@sopuli.xyz
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    1 month ago

    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
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      1 month ago

      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.

      • flora_explora@beehaw.org
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        1 month ago

        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 spez@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      I think it’s more complicated than that. For example, bamboo “trees” are actually in the grass family.

      • NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        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.

      • NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world
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        1 month 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.

        • Lukas Murch@thelemmy.club
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          1 month ago

          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!

        • Devmapall@lemm.ee
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          1 month 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

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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          1 month 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!

  • obvs@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • OrteilGenou@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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

  • Deconceptualist@lemm.ee
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    1 month 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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      1 month 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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        1 month ago

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

  • altphoto@lemmy.today
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    1 month ago

    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!

    • RedAggroBest@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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
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        1 month ago

        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.

        • RedAggroBest@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          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
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        1 month ago

        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?

        • RedAggroBest@lemmy.world
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          30 days ago

          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.

            • RedAggroBest@lemmy.world
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              30 days ago

              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.

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      1 month 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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        1 month 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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            1 month 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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        1 month 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.

        • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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          1 month ago

          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.

          • huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 month ago

            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.