Listen.
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Listen. I wasn't born yesterday. I know that fungi aren't plants: they don't have chloroplasts to photosynthesize. They don't use cellulose for their cell walls like plants.
But what *do* they use then? Chitin! Like a bug! This is what the exoskeletons of insects (such as ants) are made of!
The implications of this are marvelous. Consider #prototaxites the tree-size fungi of the Silurian. They stood tall using chitin. And to me? THAT says that giant ants may be more possible than we think!
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Listen. I wasn't born yesterday. I know that fungi aren't plants: they don't have chloroplasts to photosynthesize. They don't use cellulose for their cell walls like plants.
But what *do* they use then? Chitin! Like a bug! This is what the exoskeletons of insects (such as ants) are made of!
The implications of this are marvelous. Consider #prototaxites the tree-size fungi of the Silurian. They stood tall using chitin. And to me? THAT says that giant ants may be more possible than we think!
@futurebird eternally relevant.
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F myrmepropagandist shared this topic
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@futurebird eternally relevant.
I'm trying to learn about sexual reproduction in mushrooms and it's harder to find a good explanation than you'd think. The first few I've read were all cell diagrams and very technical and I understand how the haploid cells combine, then just sit there for a long time for some reason, then they become diploid and a spore... Oh dear, but I don't know how one fungi meets another... how do they get in touch with each other? They don't have flowers OR tinder.
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I'm trying to learn about sexual reproduction in mushrooms and it's harder to find a good explanation than you'd think. The first few I've read were all cell diagrams and very technical and I understand how the haploid cells combine, then just sit there for a long time for some reason, then they become diploid and a spore... Oh dear, but I don't know how one fungi meets another... how do they get in touch with each other? They don't have flowers OR tinder.
@futurebird @philbetts and then there are so many different variants on how they do it. getting ONE explanation only explains it for ONE species (or a closely related group of them)
let alone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mating_in_fungi has 3 different variants and hints at there being "many exceptions" -
I'm trying to learn about sexual reproduction in mushrooms and it's harder to find a good explanation than you'd think. The first few I've read were all cell diagrams and very technical and I understand how the haploid cells combine, then just sit there for a long time for some reason, then they become diploid and a spore... Oh dear, but I don't know how one fungi meets another... how do they get in touch with each other? They don't have flowers OR tinder.
It kind of seems like they just grow into each other underground or in whatever substrate the mycelium has colonized.
Many fungi can and will produce fruiting bodies (mushrooms, or the blooms on molds) without sexual reproduction.
But in living things sexual reproduction is pretty powerful, and worth the effort. Only mating with adjacent fungi seems too limited... I feel like I'm not getting this at all.
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Listen. I wasn't born yesterday. I know that fungi aren't plants: they don't have chloroplasts to photosynthesize. They don't use cellulose for their cell walls like plants.
But what *do* they use then? Chitin! Like a bug! This is what the exoskeletons of insects (such as ants) are made of!
The implications of this are marvelous. Consider #prototaxites the tree-size fungi of the Silurian. They stood tall using chitin. And to me? THAT says that giant ants may be more possible than we think!
@futurebird me reading the first paragraph: correct, they use chitin
me reading the second paragraph: oh that's where this is going
me reading the third paragraph: there's actually (disputed) evidence that they weren't upright, but rather laid flat, though I'm not sure if that's been discredited or not -
Listen. I wasn't born yesterday. I know that fungi aren't plants: they don't have chloroplasts to photosynthesize. They don't use cellulose for their cell walls like plants.
But what *do* they use then? Chitin! Like a bug! This is what the exoskeletons of insects (such as ants) are made of!
The implications of this are marvelous. Consider #prototaxites the tree-size fungi of the Silurian. They stood tall using chitin. And to me? THAT says that giant ants may be more possible than we think!
@futurebird I thought the insect size limit was the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere? Which is why they were so much bigger in the Carboniferous period. But it's been a long time since I studied that.
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@futurebird I thought the insect size limit was the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere? Which is why they were so much bigger in the Carboniferous period. But it's been a long time since I studied that.
It seems that higher O2 levels may have made larger arthropods more possible, but there is evidence of Arthropleura, the largest arthropod ever existed when O2 levels were similar to what we have today as well. So, it's not like it's a hard rule.
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Listen. I wasn't born yesterday. I know that fungi aren't plants: they don't have chloroplasts to photosynthesize. They don't use cellulose for their cell walls like plants.
But what *do* they use then? Chitin! Like a bug! This is what the exoskeletons of insects (such as ants) are made of!
The implications of this are marvelous. Consider #prototaxites the tree-size fungi of the Silurian. They stood tall using chitin. And to me? THAT says that giant ants may be more possible than we think!
@futurebird One of my favourite dubiously-useful trivia pieces is this: Not only aren't fungi plants; animals and fungi are more closely related to each other than either of them are to plants!
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Listen. I wasn't born yesterday. I know that fungi aren't plants: they don't have chloroplasts to photosynthesize. They don't use cellulose for their cell walls like plants.
But what *do* they use then? Chitin! Like a bug! This is what the exoskeletons of insects (such as ants) are made of!
The implications of this are marvelous. Consider #prototaxites the tree-size fungi of the Silurian. They stood tall using chitin. And to me? THAT says that giant ants may be more possible than we think!
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Yay?
YAY!!
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@futurebird One of my favourite dubiously-useful trivia pieces is this: Not only aren't fungi plants; animals and fungi are more closely related to each other than either of them are to plants!
@futurebird A related (*drumroll*) dubiously-useful trivia piece:
A saltwater crocodile and a house sparrow are more closely related to each other than either of them are to a lizard.
(Crocodilians and birds are the only living archosaurs, the clade that also once encompassed all the dinosaurs. Crocodilians branched off at some point before dinosaurs arose, birds *are* dinosaurs. And lizards had branched off well before that.)
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Listen. I wasn't born yesterday. I know that fungi aren't plants: they don't have chloroplasts to photosynthesize. They don't use cellulose for their cell walls like plants.
But what *do* they use then? Chitin! Like a bug! This is what the exoskeletons of insects (such as ants) are made of!
The implications of this are marvelous. Consider #prototaxites the tree-size fungi of the Silurian. They stood tall using chitin. And to me? THAT says that giant ants may be more possible than we think!
@futurebird
1/2
Prototaxites had cylindrical layers, like a tree. (I'm aware of the rolled-up spiral interpretations. Provisionally, I think them less likely, but for the sake of this discussion let's set them aside.)So the chitin of Prototaxites was not merely an exoskeleton; it provided internal support as well.
Traditionally, an ant's chitin is assumed to be purely exoskeletal. But that's not entirely true; much of an ant's digestive system is also coated with chitin.
