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| Questions that don't need their own topics vol.2; New and fresh | |
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| Topic Started: Jan 4 2018, 11:18 AM (26,863 Views) | |
| Setaceous Cetacean | May 7 2018, 05:36 PM Post #526 |
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Does anyone here know why most plants aren’t saprophytic (that is, they don’t try to break down and absorb the energy from decaying biological material like fungi do)? Are there major energy demands caused by digesting and processing decaying matter as opposed to simply waiting for it to decay into nutrients and minerals? |
If you like balloons, the color red, or mixotrophic plants derived from photosynthetic vertebrate-analogues, then check out my xenobiology project Solais
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| Mynameisnotdave23 | May 7 2018, 07:45 PM Post #527 |
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Idiot Extraordinaire
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I have a few questions regarding the plausibility of the megasquid from tfiw: I remember hearing that muscle alone couldn't support it's weight, is this true? If it was smaller, would it be more plausible? What if the muscle evolved into a stronger material, like ''false bone''? If a cephalopod really did become terrestrial, would it be more plausible if it became something like a gastropod, where it drags it's body along with it's arms on a slimy trail? Also, in the documentary, the megasquid is stated to have evolved from the swampus, which is an octopus. Did the octopus somehow evolve another pair of arms? Did squid also convergently evolve terrestrial locomotion alongside octopi? |
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Projects Avisia, an island archipelago isolated for over 88 million years, and is know home to megafaunal birds, mekosuchine crocodiles, and many relics. (currently in infancy) Read here: http://s1.zetaboards.com/Conceptual_Evolution/topic/8192410/2/#new Deviantart: https://mynameisnotdave23.deviantart.com/ | |
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| IIGSY | May 7 2018, 08:57 PM Post #528 |
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A huntsman spider that wastes time on the internet because it has nothing better to do
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I think if cephalopods became terrestrial, they would be small, low profile and assimilate with the surrounding "bugs". But to answer the question, I think muscle alone could support it. But it would have to be pretty small. Sliding around like a gastropod would be pretty interesting though. |
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Projects Punga: A terraformed world with no vertebrates Last one crawling: The last arthropod ARTH-6810: A world without vertebrates (It's ded, but you can still read I guess) Potential ideas- Swamp world: A world covered in lakes, with the largest being caspian sized. Nematozoic: After a mass extinction of ultimate proportions, a single species of nematode is the only surviving animal. Tri-devonian: A devonian like ecosystem with holocene species on three different continents. Quotes Phylogeny of the arthropods and some related groups In honor of the greatest clade of all time More pictures Other cool things All African countries can fit into Brazil
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| Talenkauen | May 7 2018, 09:26 PM Post #529 |
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Perpetually paranoid iguanodont
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Now that think about it, terrestrial cephalopods that replace some arthropods would be kinda cool. I might use that in a future project. Though, it might not be for a while, because I'm not confident in any of my current project ideas (or any of my ideas from years back, either). Edited by Talenkauen, May 7 2018, 09:49 PM.
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| IIGSY | May 7 2018, 10:12 PM Post #530 |
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A huntsman spider that wastes time on the internet because it has nothing better to do
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Well, they wouldn't replace any arthropods per say. It would be more along the line of terrestrial annelids and gastropods |
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Projects Punga: A terraformed world with no vertebrates Last one crawling: The last arthropod ARTH-6810: A world without vertebrates (It's ded, but you can still read I guess) Potential ideas- Swamp world: A world covered in lakes, with the largest being caspian sized. Nematozoic: After a mass extinction of ultimate proportions, a single species of nematode is the only surviving animal. Tri-devonian: A devonian like ecosystem with holocene species on three different continents. Quotes Phylogeny of the arthropods and some related groups In honor of the greatest clade of all time More pictures Other cool things All African countries can fit into Brazil
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| Flisch | May 8 2018, 03:48 AM Post #531 |
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Superhuman
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Well, yes, obviously. Breaking down matter into usable nutrients is costlier than simply absorbing the already "processed" nutrients.
I think if cephalopods became terrestrial (and personally I think octopdes are the primary candidate here) their locomotion will be unlike what we currently have. Fish pushed themselves forward with fleshy fins, serpentine animals slither around and arthropods have legs. Cephalopods (or octopdoes rather) do not really work exactly like that. Actually if you look at an octopus on land, it has a very unique sort of "gait", where it pulls tentacles forward and then slides across the surface. The first step would be to make this form of locomotion more organized, with a defined sequence of which tentacles goes where when. Over time I suppose those tentacles used for crawling will specialize into that area and become little fleshy pads, which is not that unlike actual, albeit stubby, legs. I'm actually curious about the evolution of bones in octopodes. They already have hardened body parts, most prominently their beaks, but also their suction cups or hooks. Could their rows of hooks and cups actually ossify completely and turn into spine-like structures supporting the legs? This would have interesting implications. If their legs evolve proper bones but their body does not, larger forms might actually turn into "mostly-legs" things, with the organs distributed at the base of the tentacles. Maybe they would evolve a circular ribcage of sorts of the bones at the base of the tentacles merging. |
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| Setaceous Cetacean | May 8 2018, 06:47 AM Post #532 |
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But wouldn’t most of the energy from decaying organic material be extracted by the detritivores and saprotrophs? The plants would be left with their waste products, which don’t give them energy as they are absorbed but are necessary for photosynthesis. What I’m asking is why plants don’t engage in the same behavior as fungi: breaking down decaying matter. |
If you like balloons, the color red, or mixotrophic plants derived from photosynthetic vertebrate-analogues, then check out my xenobiology project Solais
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| Russwallac | May 8 2018, 07:26 AM Post #533 |
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"Ta-da!"
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Plants already get plenty of energy from photosynthesis. Unless the soil is particularly nutrient-poor, there's no reason for them to expend the extra effort to break down food before absorbing nutrients. Fungi aren't photosynthetic, so they can't afford to just passively absorb nutrients. |
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| Flisch | May 8 2018, 01:02 PM Post #534 |
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Superhuman
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Plants don't absorb nutrients from the ground for energy. That's what photosynthesis is for. They need the nutrients to sustain the photosynthesis. Hence it is energetically more useful for them to use the fully processed substances, rather than to process them themselves. Maybe Holben can chime in. He's pretty knowledgeable about photosynthesis. Edited by Flisch, May 8 2018, 01:02 PM.
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| Holben | May 8 2018, 01:34 PM Post #535 |
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Rumbo a la Victoria
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It's a particularly interesting question because many plants were earlier believed to be saprotrophic, including some orchids and scattered other species, but close inspection reveals each to be parasitising fungi. So, 'saprophytes' are a step removed from the saprotrophic processes which provide them with nutrients and energy, which sounds like an inefficient and convoluted way of going about it. I can't tell you why this or that feature isn't present in plants, but I can make a suggestion. Plant matter is very hard to digest, and fungi have had hundreds of millions of years of working out how to digest tough molecules like celluloses and lignins and even though many of the required enzymes have quite complicated mechanisms, structures of co-factors, fungi have become very good at it. There are some bacteria that are capable of digesting lignin too, but their methods are less efficient, and attempts to express the fungal enzymes in them have failed, so they might not be able to produce the enzymes fungi can for very fundamental reasons. There's a commercial importance to this because 1) a lot of food grade byproducts used in agriculture like spent grain from brewing have a high lignin content, and much of that is wasted since gut microbiota in animals are really bad at digesting the fibrous portion of it and 2) the products of lignin degradation could be a renewable source of industrial chemicals like lubricants and surfactants which could lessen our dependence on petroleum products, so it'd be cool if this was figured out. As far as I have been able to find out, despite being able to synthesise and modify lignin, plants can't actually effectively degrade it. If they could, maybe losing foliage in the autumn wouldn't even occur, as they could break down the entire leaf instead of just a fraction. So, maybe plants have to rely on parasitising fungi to break down a large part of plant matter, and that might make the method 'saprophytes' use the only viable one. As for decaying matter other than plant matter, any plant will happily take up the nutrients from decomposing animals from the soil or animal waste, it just doesn't happen often (unless you trap them, like in so-called carnivorous plants, or host them and benefit from their waste products) so it's not worth it unless you're really starved for nutrients. |
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Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea. "It is the old wound my king. It has never healed." | |
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| Sheather | May 8 2018, 01:38 PM Post #536 |
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Plants do not need to break down organic matter on their own because they usually have symbiotic relationships with fungi which have already evolved to do so. Though these relationships are best studied in plants such as orchids or some forest trees the relationship exists to some extent in practically all plants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza |
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| beingsneaky | May 8 2018, 07:10 PM Post #537 |
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Adolescent
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in what situation do you see an animal evolving 3 legs |
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| Talenkauen | May 8 2018, 07:36 PM Post #538 |
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Perpetually paranoid iguanodont
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That is a really vague question. It depends heavily on the context of what kind of organism it is, the anatomy of both it and its non-tripedal ancestors, and the ecological/biological pressures it faced to make it evolve that way. In that case, there are plenty of scenarios for an organism to evolve a tripedal stance, or at least a rough equivalent. Edited by Talenkauen, May 8 2018, 08:06 PM.
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| Akurian452 | May 8 2018, 08:48 PM Post #539 |
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Adult
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Could aquatic invertebrates be larger than vertebrates? Think a sea worm or a lancelet larger than a blue whale. I know lancelet aren't true invertebrates but they're not quite vertebrates either and I'm trying to determine if aquatic organisms with less rigid bodies and are not cell colonies could achieve equal or greater size than whales.
Edited by Akurian452, May 8 2018, 09:11 PM.
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| Hola La | May 9 2018, 02:55 AM Post #540 |
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Newborn
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is that possible if bone or shell made from gold ? |
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