On trees...

Had to look it up because I didnt beleive
sure enough its correct
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree
- Something poetic and quaint about a link to a Wikipedia article titled "Tree"
  
  reddit has broken me. I was expecting it to point to weed.
- Scishow had an episode about it a week ago. It's a strategy, not a species.

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.
*Thought I'd add an edit, since this post got quite a few eyes on it: It was mostly coal that all those trees turned into. Not oil.
- Mushrooms are the great undertaker, the great decomposer. The Langoliers. They are just waiting to eat you, and they're happy to share their fruits in the meantime. They're fattening you up. They can wait.
  
  That Langoliers reference spotted in the wild!
- Didn't those trees become coal, not oil?
  
  Yes. I made mention of this in a reply to someone else as well. I'm not sure if my teacher (like 30 years ago) told us wrong or if I simply remembered it wrong.
  
  I think near water they became oil and far from water they became coal
- I thought that was coal
- I imagine dead trees were flammable, even back then. And oxygen levels were 15% higher. Can you imagine the forest fires?
  
  Fire wasn't invented back then
- I love this fact, and am curious where you learned it?
  
  I learned it nearly 30 years ago in school. I just did a search and found a link about it, though.
  Also, seems that either I remembered wrongly, or my teacher made a mistake, but it seems it was most of the worlds coal; not oil, that came from all the piles of trees from that period.
  https://www.thorogood.co.uk/treevolution-how-trees-came-first-and-rot-came-later-in-earths-deep-past/

I'm a billion years, crabs will start turning into trees and trees into crabs. merging into the ubercreature
- I'm a billion years
  Damn. You look good for your age.
  
  I'd argue, but I agree. I don't need to know how they look, if they're a billion years and capable of communicating, whatever state they're in looks good. Even if its a fungus posessed rot monster.
- "ubercreature" excuse me, lichen would like a word with you
  
  lichen is the shit
- I imagine it'll look like paras
  
  Paras is a fungus. Totally different thing.
- you may not like it but Ms Crabtree is what peak performance looks like

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

I think palm trees are a kind of grass

Concentrated sun energy sinks

There are fern trees, conifer trees, and flowering trees. Where are my moss trees?
- https://gobotany.nativeplanttrust.org/species/dendrolycopodium/dendroideum/
  https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/204198-Dendrolycopodium-obscurum
  
  Except clubmoss isn't moss iirc? They're vascular and more of a fern than moss.

So that's why every stargate planet looks like Canada
- Sadly Lemmy isn't big enough to support niche communities, but I really enjoyed r/unexpectedstargate back in the day.
  
  Isn't big enough yet ❤️
- That and every Stargate planet is Vancouver
- 🤣🤣🤣

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
- Very cool read, thank you
- 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

I wasn't ready for how weird this comment section turned out to be...
- Based on your username, you should be used to weird shit.
  
  Doesn't mean I can't still be aww'd though!

Same for roots, btw, just earlier.

Arborization !

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.
  
  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.
  
  we're living through a similar period but with plastics :)
  
  Yes, that is how we got coal.
- u might be onto something, this thread sent me down the rabbit hole and penises have evolved independently at least 6 times

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

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.
- Then what are the dolphins thankful for?
  
  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.

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.
- Well humans are a type of great ape, sooooll
  
  I'm more of a middling ape myself honestly
- Hit me. I love evolutionary fun facts.
  
  smackkk

Unsurpassable power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crabtree
- Now we just need crabs to evolve a treecrab and we can have the two battle for the ultimate life form
- The absolute peak of evolution. Everyone, go home.
- Good moaning!
- Not to be confused with Dryococelus aka the "tree lobster"

So crabapple trees...?
- evolution intensifies

I always liked the idea of being a tree like life form.
- 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

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.
  
  People have experimented with that sort of thing. Here's a DIY for going into 3rd person mode using a camera on a stick and some electronics in a backpack. Bit of googling also finds me body swap experiments, but nothing on a crotch perspective.
  
  Microphones and headphones too.

Its basically just the best way to be a large plant if you're not gonna be a big parasitic ivy. Once your plant circulatory system gets complex enough to send stuff further away, you start getting big enough that you need hard tissues just to stop yourself from folding over.

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!
- It's also mindblowing that chihuahua and tibetan mastiff belong to the same species even tho they look entirely different.
  
  also that humans did that is wild

Well, I'm just a product of my environment.

The genus Cornus is a huge middle finger to growth-form-based taxonomy. It contains dogwood trees and also bunchberry, an itty bitty herb that grows on the forest floor.
The first "trees" were also lycopods whose closest extant relatives are the club mosses, a name which gives you an idea of how big they get. All the coal in the world is from a period where plants figured out wood before decomposers learned how to break it down and is mainly the result of a bunch of lycopod trunks sinking into peat bugs and slowly getting compressed.
- We use a specific type of Lycopodium as a control group to calculate pollen counts and various other metrics in palaeoecology. It's pollen is super distinct.
  
  That's super neat. Is that little triangular bit at the top a germ pore or something else? It's funny how you get one clade that takes what you'd think would be a really optimizable form like a spore or a pollen grain and takes a left turn with it. In fungi, Entolomas are really identifiable because their spores are pink and cube shaped.

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

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
  
  fair enough
  
  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!
- I think it's more complicated than that. For example, bamboo "trees" are actually in the grass family.
  
  Yeah? So are palms trees
  
  huh I never considered bamboo to be a tree in the first place

Trees are like every other plant, ONLY MORE SO

Fish too
- That makes sense. And I feel like it makes me understand trees better. This is what I’m thinking.
  The fitness landscape for a moving creature underwater is pretty limited. You gotta be hydrodynamic and there aren’t many solutions to that. But we still get variety; eels and jellyfish, for example.
  With plants you also have some strong limitations. Plants don’t move. They’re rooted to the ground. Plus they compete over height. So, the solution set consists of sturdy and tall trees.
  Moving creatures on land have a lot of more options so evolution achieved more variety. I’m not sure if distinct branches of moving creatures on land arrived at the “same” evolutionary solution.

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.

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 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.

Heh, branch

Its trees and crabs all the way down.

Are at least all woody plants related?
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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?

I want to be a tree too when I grow up!

Trees are tall because trees are tall.

By the logic we are not humans...
- no, we didn’t have mice and also ants evolve into humans… there’s one distinct line of ancestors…
  it’s called convergent evolution. check out wikipedia
- logic