Hah, that's cool! It would have been about 5-6 years ago on campus with Caplan and his sons, another grad student, and you and your brother. The twins won, of course, seeing as how they apparently share a large brain. I have to admit, I really didn't like the game; the hidden simultaneous turns bit was great, but I don't want to be good at betraying allies so the core competency bothers me. You guys were all great fun to play with, though!
Wonderful overview! Fungi are creepy as hell, like a whole parallel world we don't know about, but works strangely similarly to ours in the macro sense, but entirely differently in the micro sense.
Why do no animals use photosynthesis or plants walk around?
I guess it's just not adaptive to try a little bit of both so organisms can never get there via gradient descent. But it seems useful to have a passive energy source on your head.
There are some, but more often, the answer is that specialization is better than being a generalist. Because of this, we generally see symbiosis more often than photosynthetic capability in fungi and animals. Examples include lichen, corals, sea anemones, and jellyfish. However, the smaller you get, the more blurred the lines become and more often you'll see a truly photosynthetic animal which is weird. There's a sea slug (plakobranchus ocellatus) for example that uses chloroplasts from the algae it eats to do its own photosynthesis. This is called kleptoplasty and it's a really cool process because the rest of the algal cell gets destroyed, and even though chloroplasts dont work on their own, the sea slug puts them into it's own donor cells using "horizontal gene transfer". But this process is still disputed as the true mechanism of how this happens is up for debate.
That's essentially the story of mitochondria, isn't it? Foreign cells that just weren't consumed and worked out a deal with the new host?
The sea slug example is really interesting, because I had always figured the biggest block to animal photosynthesis was on the input side: the chemical inputs needed to produce photosynthetic energy don't scale well enough to provide a noticeable amount of energy to an animal. Plants are very low energy by comparison to animals, so they can get the inputs easily enough, but using energy at the scale animals do would make collection and storage infeasible. Sort of like trying to use those Hot-Hands packets to heat your entire house.
That a sea slug does it seems to imply there maybe is a middle ground somewhere that works out alright, so long as you don't have to make the system yourself. You'd think there would be a lizard or more likely insect somewhere that had pulled off a similar trick, only more successful since they have more direct access to the sun.
As an aside, are you related to Alex Tabarrock, of GMU? If so, I think we played Diplomacy together once.
Yes, that's my dad! It could very well be true! Both myself and brother maxwell frequently played diplomacy with the Caplans growing up
Hah, that's cool! It would have been about 5-6 years ago on campus with Caplan and his sons, another grad student, and you and your brother. The twins won, of course, seeing as how they apparently share a large brain. I have to admit, I really didn't like the game; the hidden simultaneous turns bit was great, but I don't want to be good at betraying allies so the core competency bothers me. You guys were all great fun to play with, though!
Wonderful overview! Fungi are creepy as hell, like a whole parallel world we don't know about, but works strangely similarly to ours in the macro sense, but entirely differently in the micro sense.
Strange and unusual emergence!
Why do no animals use photosynthesis or plants walk around?
I guess it's just not adaptive to try a little bit of both so organisms can never get there via gradient descent. But it seems useful to have a passive energy source on your head.
There are some, but more often, the answer is that specialization is better than being a generalist. Because of this, we generally see symbiosis more often than photosynthetic capability in fungi and animals. Examples include lichen, corals, sea anemones, and jellyfish. However, the smaller you get, the more blurred the lines become and more often you'll see a truly photosynthetic animal which is weird. There's a sea slug (plakobranchus ocellatus) for example that uses chloroplasts from the algae it eats to do its own photosynthesis. This is called kleptoplasty and it's a really cool process because the rest of the algal cell gets destroyed, and even though chloroplasts dont work on their own, the sea slug puts them into it's own donor cells using "horizontal gene transfer". But this process is still disputed as the true mechanism of how this happens is up for debate.
That's essentially the story of mitochondria, isn't it? Foreign cells that just weren't consumed and worked out a deal with the new host?
The sea slug example is really interesting, because I had always figured the biggest block to animal photosynthesis was on the input side: the chemical inputs needed to produce photosynthetic energy don't scale well enough to provide a noticeable amount of energy to an animal. Plants are very low energy by comparison to animals, so they can get the inputs easily enough, but using energy at the scale animals do would make collection and storage infeasible. Sort of like trying to use those Hot-Hands packets to heat your entire house.
That a sea slug does it seems to imply there maybe is a middle ground somewhere that works out alright, so long as you don't have to make the system yourself. You'd think there would be a lizard or more likely insect somewhere that had pulled off a similar trick, only more successful since they have more direct access to the sun.