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.

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 imagine it'll look like paras
- Paras is a fungus. Totally different thing.

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

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

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 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

I think palm trees are a kind of grass

I didn’t know that and I agree
I'm firmly in this camp.

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.

So crabapple trees...?

evolution intensifies

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 .

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.
Hit me. I love evolutionary fun facts.
- smackkk
Well humans are a type of great ape, sooooll

Unsurpassable power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crabtree

The absolute peak of evolution. Everyone, go home.
Good moaning!
Not to be confused with Dryococelus aka the "tree lobster"

Same for roots, btw, just earlier.

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.

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.

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 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 awe'd though!

Arborization !

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

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

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

Trees are like every other plant, ONLY MORE SO

Concentrated sun energy sinks

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 want to be a tree too when I grow up!

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

By the logic we are not humans...

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

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?