Adhit’s Compendia

hmm…this is a tough one because there aren’t many plant evolutionary traits i think are flat out stupid? like theres at least like one a week that makes me shit bricks, but id say with 99% of plant stuff i can at least see how it got to the conclusion of making a certain structure, and most of the time its something way smarter than i would have come up with if i was like, god or something. 

the closest i can think of would be something from back before plants figured out literally anything….i know ive talked about this a few months ago, but i really can’t get over a variety of extinct plants. currently my favorite from the dawn of plants on land is Aglaophyton major, a plant that was around 410 million years ago and was in the stage where plant anatomy was shifting from a primitive upright stem sprouting from a thallus (hornwort style) to a stem creeping along the ground.

this is literally so embarrassing. humans finding fossils of this is analogous to mankind as a whole accidentally walking in on someone in the public restroom of life. 

So I found this coconut on the beach in Costa Rica and when I opened it THIS was inside. I think it’s the endosperm (or whatever you call the thing that develops into the tree). The coconut water itself wasn’t as sweet as usual (probably because it had sprouted), but the little sprout boi tasted sweet on one end and salty on the other. (submitted by @jewishpangolin)

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And a model:

Metus conglomeratus

This odd member of the cladoniaceae family is native to the southern hemisphere and has been found thus far in Australia and South America. Sadly, not much is known about it, as with many lichens not common native to the northern hemisphere, but she’s beautiful and deserves appreciation. I would love to survey and study this lesser-known species, but funding. So support your local lichenologists, and continue to go out and find the good lichens for us! 

This is a ghost heart. What they’ve done is taken a pig heart and stripped it down to, basically, a cell framework that they can use to BUILD A NEW HEART UPON. You could inject stem cells into this framework so that a newly formed personalized heart can be transplanted into a donor with a significantly reduced chance of rejection. FUCKING AMAZING. It’s not been done with human tissue yet, but the promise this given to people who need hearts - or kidneys or livers or whatever - is beautiful. Science is beautiful.

And it’s IMPERATIVE to mention that a woman, Doris Taylor, at the Texas Heart Institute developed this. And she started with a rat heart and worked up to he bigger, more complex (and more human) pig heart. What a total bad ass.

The corrected information

WOMEN IN SCIENCE

The world’s most indestructible critter just got even more indestructible.

Not content with its existing abilities to survive extreme temperatures, pressures, and the airless vacuum of space, the humble yet seemingly unkillable tardigrade looks to have unlocked another amazing superpower: the ability to withstand lethal doses of ultraviolet (UV) radiation.

While we have observed tardigrades surviving radiation before now thanks to a ‘damage suppression’ protein called Dsup, this UV resistance trick is a newly identified feather in the tardigrade’s cap, operating via a different kind of biological mechanism.

Plant of the Day

Sunday 8 October 2017

At the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, London, the carnivorous plant Drosophyllum lusitanicum (Portuguese sundew, dewy pine, slobbering pine) was catching the sunlight as well as insects. This species is native to areas of Portugal, Spain, and Morocco and prefers a Mediterranean climate with mild wet winters and hot dry summers.  

this is actually a small sub branch of botany thats been growing and gaining some recognition in the past 5 years or so called plant cognition! we’ve been thinking about if plants can possibly be intelligent to any degree for centuries, but the main paper that started up this huge discussion in the modern era was one called Experience Teaches Plants to Learn Faster and Forget Slower in Environments Where It Matters by Monica Gagliano, a plant researcher in Australia who specializes in it. because the results indicated that plants were possible of learning and retaining information in a kind of memory in response to environmental changes, it received a lot of backlash and denial- generally in science, that kind of intelligent reaction to an organism’s environment is a good indicator of cognitive behavior in the organism. it got rejected by 10 different journals before being published in 2014. 

the experiment worked like this. i’ve talked before about mimosa pudica, a tropical plant that curls its leaves back when touched (they go back to normal in a few minutes):

this is to help deter predators among other things. but in this experiment, Gagliano used it as an indicator of stimulus and to test cognitive function. It’s well known that pudica has a rudimentary nervous system that can even be temporarily inhibited using anesthetics (just like ours can!). she hooked up a ton of these plants in pots to identical rail systems that allowed them to be lightly dropped in an identical way, juuuuust heavy enough to trigger the stimulus so all the leaves drop down when they hit the bottom (a piece of foam so they wouldn’t actually hurt the plants). every time the plants would be dropped, they would close up. 

but after the plants were dropped about 60 times each, they stopped responding to the drop. 

they remembered that no harm was coming from this action and decided that it was against their best interests to keep expending energy closing their leaves. they 200% learned to stop. 

she decided to test it further. she put some of the plants in a shaker and let them receive a more jarring response; the plants closed up as usual. then, she put them back in the droppers and dropped them again. they didn’t close up. they had remembered that response. this dispels the obvious rebuttal to this experiment of the plants just being tired; they still closed up when stimulated differently.

they just chose not to close up when they hit a stimulus they remembered. 

it turns out that not only could they remember to keep their leaves open when dropped on the apparatus, but they remembered after 28 days when she kept testing it!! apparently by the end of the experiment, all the plants had decided to keep their leaves open when dropped!!!!

how do they do this?? we literally dont know. they have no central brain, only a basic nervous system. can other plants do this??? 

well, adding onto that, venus fly traps can count! like. they have three hairs inside their traps, and all three must be touched within 20 seconds for the trap to close. once closed, those three trigger hairs must continue to be stimulated by thrashing prey, or the trap will reopen. 

so yeah like. basically ‘are they sentient’: apparently to an extent???? we dont know exactly why or how but they are??? maybe???? sort of????? at least some of them are?? but they dont have a brain so everyones like????????????????????? maybe its through a signaling network????????????????? but like how would that even work?????????

plant consciousness is still new enough to be dismissed as crazy by a lot of biologists but like. the evidence is there. we don’t know a whole lot and its clearly a radically different kind of intelligence than we know in animals, but it’s there and we 200% dont know how it works yet or even the full extent of how plants use this intelligence (for example: does a redwood have the same intelligence as a venus fly trap?? how does it learn things and use that knowledge???)