So crabapple trees...?
this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Had to look it up because I didnt beleive
sure enough its correct
Something poetic and quaint about a link to a Wikipedia article titled "Tree"
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 the 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.
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
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.
@DoubleSpace@lemm.ee the best ideas start as jokes
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Heh, branch
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
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I think it's more complicated than that. For example, bamboo "trees" are actually in the grass family.
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Trees are tall because trees are tall.
Its called convergent evolution and you also have some shit you wouldnt believe that makes all apes similar to us.
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.
Unsurpassable power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crabtree
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
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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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I know an old woman who swallowed a fly...
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