TIL in the Carboniferous Period, no fungus existed to decompose trees. They just grew on top of each other up and up.
TIL in the Carboniferous Period, no fungus existed to decompose trees. They just grew on top of each other up and up.
The weight of the trees was so great that the ones on the bottom got squished and became coal. That’s where coal is from. Bonus fact: the whole time this was happening, sharks were hunting in the oceans. Sharks are older than trees and fungus!
Fungi in general are about twice as old as sharks. Roughly a billion years vs ~450 million years.
The point is there just weren't any which had bacteria to decompose trees, as no bacteria had evolved the ability yet. Until there were. Took millions of years though.
Fun fact, now we have mushrooms which can deal with plastic.
Pestalotiopsis microspora is a type of endophytic fungus discovered in the Amazon rainforest in 2011 which contains bacteria that can biodegrade and break down synthetic plastic polymers.
that's what i was thinkin... surely single-cell eukaryote (fungi) is earlier than complex eukaryote (shark)?
you'd think so, but sharks were in fact the first lifeform to be summoned from the astral planes, everything else evolved from a single shark cell that had the right mutations to survive (all sharks simply died within minutes until plants had created enough oxygen for them to breathe, at which point they died within days until the evolution of other animals)
Thank God for fungi. They do so much for us and now eating plastics. We really need something to eat it all
There's also fungi which can use radiation as a source of energy, radiotrophic fungi, and we've been thinking about using them as radiation shields in spacecraft.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus#Use_in_human_spaceflight
Is this a good thing? Consuming plastic means releasing all the carbon that they're made of.
Awesome, now they'll just dump all the plastic in the Amazon and congratulate themselves for doing the right thing
What Amazon? Is that one of those sheerwood forest things?
Fungi are pretty awesome. We can decompose plastic with them. Engage in inter dimensional astral travel with them. And have a nice trip by a campfire without ever leaving the chair.
...
At some point this will happen with plastics too. Soo much plastic is ending up in nature, with soo much energy ready for the taking. When one fungus or bacteria mutates just right to munch on that feast of plastic, that vast energy source will ensure that organism multiplies rapidly.
And that is when plastic stops beeing useful for many of the tasks we humans use it for. If your plastic container decomposes as rapidly as a cardboard box, it will quickly become much less usefull.
There are already organisms which can digest certain plastics. The problem (AFAIK) is they can digest other stuff more easily. So maybe in landfills ill work, not so much in nature were there's other organic matter for the taking.
If your plastic container decomposes as rapidly as a cardboard box, it will quickly become much less usefull.
How so? Plastic would retain its current properties, just something may break it down over time. Wood is still useful after all.
Cardboard boxes last almost indefinitely in a cool dry warehouse. It's not just a matter of time, but the environment that matters.
It would depend on how well we can control it.
Ideally the material would be completely nonreactive for as long as you're using it and then instantly degrade into component elements.
The faster things degrade, the higher the chance that they'll degrade when you don't want it to.
Well the carboniferous period lasted 60 million years. If life takes even a fraction of that to figure out plastics, humans will be long, long dead by the time they do. But I'm sure it'll be something interesting for future non-human civilizations to ponder over.
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Bonus fact bonus fact: Shakes are older than the rings of Saturn.
You did a great job in the Star Waes prequals, btw
I would've guessed milkshakes were invented in like the 1940s
I use this regularly use this as an example/precedent of a previous macro-cancer of the natural world that was detrimental to Earth's ecosystem from a mistake of evolution.
The trees removed too much carbon from the atmosphere, leading to an Ice age.
We homo-sapiens are just doing the opposite. 🔥
Don't worry though, our mother eventually found a solution to the tree's carbon capture problem, and I have every confidence she will find a solution to us and in a few million years, nothing to her 3.8 billion year old story of life, she'll finish cleaning up our mess. Problem solved, life will flourish, and new ecosystems in homeostasis with the Earth will develop... until the next macro-tumor of the natural world, at least.
if trees survived their self-inflected apocalypse, why can’t we?
Trees breed by putting their babies into extremely resilient, heat and cold protected stasis pods that can go centuries without care and attention in the right conditions - like suviving an ice age or forest fire.
Human babies are wimps by comparison - most of them would die after only a few days left outside at 0 degrees C.
Humans probably will survive too - but how many?
Elon + all this 3 mates.They didn't know what they were doing, we do, and we actively choose to keep doing it. Unlike those trees mindlessly performing a base biological imperative, we possess the capacity to stop and simply don't because we'd lose some of the comfort and convenience our destructive tech provides.
We're cruel to this planet, all the other creatures on it, and one another. So my reverse ask is, why do you want us to survive? Just because ra-ra home team? Because billions subsisting to serve the whims and ego of a few thousand of our worst, most broken, greedy sociopaths in perpetuity is somehow meaningful? Genuinely asking.
Saying "trees" is like saying "mammals."
Those trees from back then were different species of trees.
So, sure, mammals will survive, just like they survived the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. But we humans were not those mammals. And we won't be the mammals that survive our self-inflicted apocalypse.
We will be long gone.
Nah we can just blow up the planet, take that mother nature
The moon did that a long time ago. And here we are today.
The trees clogged the land, the water, and when one inevitably got struck by lightning, continent wide forest fires were common.
IIRC, it's these trees, not dinosaur bones that became most of the oil/gas deposits.
It's worth noting that when it comes to a species wrecking the environment, causing mass extinction, changing the climate, or spoiling the atmosphere, humans are not the first and we're not the worst.
We are (probably) the first to actually be (mostly) self-aware of it though. As in we could do something about it.
And we definetly won't be the last either
Oh noooo, the coal existing because of evolutionary lag theory is one of my favourites. Continents colliding and creating wet topical basins is cool too, but it’s not such a good story to tell.
I agree. Total bummer.
No shrooms?! Shitty year
There were shrooms, they just couldn't eat carbon
Whoa, good fact! Thanks
Did you learned this from the wheel in that Ukrainian mine article?