Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[TD1]

The argument from design - God did it.

All things great and small...

[Naturegirl1999]

The argument from design - God did it.

All things great and small...

I’m looking for something less faith based

[TamerVirus]

I’m looking for something less faith based

The argument from evolution - Charles Darwin did it.

All things great and small...

[Naturegirl1999]

I’m looking for something less faith based

The argument from evolution - Charles Darwin did it.

All things great and small...

but how did it evolve?

[wierd]

Fungus have evolved some very complicated biochemistry, since they are actually highly evolved lifeforms.  See for instance, the amazing antics of slime molds.


Since colonial insects, like ants, concentrate resources centrally in a tight area, it makes sense for a fungus to adapt to exploit that. There are a number of paths that could be taken-- There's the symbiosis route, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism) and there is the parasitism route. 

Conjecturally-- It makes sense for a fungus to start out by first being an opportunistic decomposer, where spores get deposited onto an ant and then sprout when the ant dies. This has a potential evolutionary path to become an active infector, if there is an advantage to sprouting "early", while the ant is still alive. (If the ant still feeds, and moves about, the fungus gets more nutrition than it otherwise would form a dead ant's corpse, AND it gets mobility to spread spores opportunistically through shared cleaning behaviors of the ants.)  From there, manipulating ant behavior to improve those outcomes seems reasonable...

Throw into this that insects and fungus are some of the oldest complex lifeforms on our planet, and you have plenty of time for mutual adaptations, both beneficial (such as with mutualism), and antagonistic (Fungus starts puppet-mastering ants to maximize its resource collection and spore distribution-- Ants adapt to discard infected ants VERY far from the colony.)

[Naturegirl1999]

Thanks
Reading about symbiosis between ants and fungi, where ants cultivate the fungi, makes me think of domestication. The ants domesticate the non parasitic fungi or aphids depending on the species of and to make them easier to take care of and dependent on the ants in the same way that humans domesticated dogs, pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys, ect. to be dependent on humans. It's cool that colonial insects beat humans to what we call a society. I find it fascinating how parasitic and mutual relationships can develop.

[Arx]

It's cool that colonial insects beat humans to what we call a society.

Biologically, humans, bees, ants, and naked mole rats all fit into "eusocial". It's pretty neat. I love insects; individually simple, complex as a group.

[Naturegirl1999]

Yes, they are fascinating. I wonder if it would be possible for others, like molluscs, to evolve eusociality as well, though first they would have to evolve social behavior. It's cool how each body of eusocial colonies can be analagous to the cells making up an individual body. Soldier ants as the immune system, queens and drones as reproductive cells, workers as the digestive system. I know it's not a perfect analogy, interesting nontheless.

[wierd]

social mollusks == yes

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/7/140728-social-octopuses-animals-oceans-science-mating/
https://www.britannica.com/animal/octopus-mollusk

[Naturegirl1999]

This is cool. Too bad NatGeo won’t let me read for more than 5 seconds

[scourge728]

There are already things that can tweak our personalities in certain ways (see: Toxoplasmosis gondii and rabies)

Wasn't that disproven, or at least not proven?
Also *insert witty comment about yeerks that I'm not clever enough to think of*

[dragdeler]

-

[King Zultan]

This is cool. Too bad NatGeo won’t let me read for more than 5 seconds

try canceling page loading in midst, sometimes it works and sometimes that allows you to also bypass annoyingly slow cookie requests when the page's actual content has long been loaded

I have also heard that you can bypass things like that if you open the page in a private window on your web browser.

[Iduno]

This is cool. Too bad NatGeo won’t let me read for more than 5 seconds

try canceling page loading in midst, sometimes it works and sometimes that allows you to also bypass annoyingly slow cookie requests when the page's actual content has long been loaded

You can also mess with programs like Noscript that block cookie requests, but that takes more fiddling.

[wierd]

Theres a paywall disabling plugin for firefox.

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox