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Lithop
Spaghetti Days


Registered: 04/09/22
Posts: 764
Loc: 🛸
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Re: Mimosa pedica aka "Sleeping Grass" [Re: LogicaL Chaos] 1
#28633103 - 01/24/24 09:46 AM (3 days, 12 hours ago) |
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Intriguing lifeform, in many ways. One I don't think I've seen IRL. Its phytoremediation potential and (tryptamine) alkaloid contents are obviously legit - the idea that it contains antivenom for one of the snakes it shares a habitat with (South East Asia, Monocled Cobra) is the sort of thing that really gets my brain going, though. The part on wiki about the drop experiment was really cool too.
^Made me think of that classic vid (I see it's mentioned on wiki). Man, the potential for relationships & communication between different plants, fungi & animals is incredible. Not to derail the thread, it's still related to the idea of interspecies interaction, I recently read in 'Entangled Life':
[a study by Toby Kiers]"Looking for 'trading decisions.' Where phosphorus was scarce, she discovered that the plant paid a higher “price” in the form of more carbon for every unit of phosphorus it received from the fungus. Where phosphorus was more abundant, the fungus received a less favorable “exchange rate.” Moreover, Keirs identified a strategy of “buy low, sell high,” replicating our familiar logic of supply and demand. She showed that the fungus actively moved phosphorus from areas where it was plentiful (where it brought a low price when exchanged with the plant root) to areas where it was scarce and therefore in higher demand, using its “microtubule motors.” By doing so it was able to manipulate the plant to supply higher quantities of carbon in return for the phosphorus."
 Like lugging your inventory to different traders just for a few extra gold on certain objects.
 I wonder; by what means these decisions are made- the Mimosa developing the antivenom in its roots for example- is it an inevitble evolutionary byproduct of some factor in their shared environment? Do they have methods of communicating their traits more specifically, perhaps in way of electrical impulses: duration, frequency, intensity? By opening and closing ion channels in order to turn genes on and off, as the speculation for the mentioned drop experiment considers? Something so far left field that we haven't even hypothesised it yet?
 Fuckin dank stuff.
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Lithop
Spaghetti Days


Registered: 04/09/22
Posts: 764
Loc: 🛸
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Re: Mimosa pudica aka "Sleeping Grass" [Re: LogicaL Chaos]
#28635258 - 01/26/24 05:49 AM (1 day, 16 hours ago) |
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^Very cool, and yeah- definitely mind boggling/expanding. The question of if and how plants store memory from stimuli is totally wild, but then again so is the idea of a seed/spore/egg IMO! I think, part of the trouble in truly relating to (and to some extents truly understanding) plants, fungi & animals comes from our default to anthropomorphising everything. Personally, I find it useful/acceptable in the sense that it allows me to feel connection to the 'other' in an instant way but in the grand scheme of things it perhaps does more harm than good. Because it sort of depends on my selfishness to assume everything is more similar to me in function than dissimilar... More value, perhaps, in adapting our ideas to their systems, rather than the other way around- if you can dig it. To develop empathy leading to harmony for something so other without having to squeeze it into a 1:1 with our own functions or mechanisms could be a sort of intellectual 'hard step'. What do you think about that, LogicaL? ('that' being the idea of evolving into some sort of union with the non human by a reevluating of our standards of comparison/study)
 :edit: spellings
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Edited by Lithop (01/26/24 05:58 AM)
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