#i watched a video on mussel reproduction yesterday and the complexity and diversity of strategies for dispersal of young is NUTS | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ookaookaooka · 1 year ago

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i was just thinking the other day about how fucked up plant pheromone signaling is. like we talk about it like “oh, plant A is getting eaten so it holds up a sign saying PREPARE THYSELF and plants B, C, and D see that and go oh shit we better start making a chemical that makes us taste bitter so we don’t get eaten” but it’s more like. if the sweat we produced while running away from something that’s trying to eat us contained aerosolized cocaine, which makes anyone who smells it start running away as fast as they can in whatever direction they happen to be pointing, which hopefully is in the opposite direction of whatever’s trying to eat us

#like. plants can’t make decisions (as far as we know). there’s no central nervous system to make decisions with #it’s just that the plants that reacted to the pheromones released by plants getting eaten by making themselves bitter were able to reproduce #because they got eaten less #i watched a video on mussel reproduction yesterday and the complexity and diversity of strategies for dispersal of young is NUTS #and it’s all because of one problem! (freshwater streams only move in one direction and freshwater mussels can’t live in salt water)#(so if the mussels released their young at random the population would quickly end up downstream and out of room)#(so they try and attract fish so they can blast their young through the gills which the young will latch onto and be carried upstream)#anyways it boggles my mind how complex of things can develop given using only random chains of events given enough time

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