flora_explora
@flora_explora@beehaw.org
- Comment on 2 days ago:
Oof, I totally get the frustration of this person. I hate questionnaires because they often have logical fallacies or edge cases that they’ve missed. If it is a questionnaire about a systemic issue, I feel that it lacks complexity to see these edge cases. But if it is about a personal issue, it’s even worse because then my edge case isn’t even considered in the questionnaire.
- Comment on stages of mitosis 2 days ago:
I feel like this makes everything more confusing. You cannot really follow the hair pins through time because the person takes them out of their hair at one time and the alignment isn’t in the hair. And step 4 confuses what it says (the sister chromatides almost divided) with what it actually shows (the cells almost divided).
- Comment on spoopy figs 6 days ago:
Oh, you’re thinking of wasps like yellowjackets. “Fig wasp” uses the taxonomic term “wasp”. There are hundreds of thousands of parasitic wasp species out there that most people aren’t familiar with. Fig wasps are gall wasps and are really tiny! Like so small you can hardly see them by the naked eye. It is fascinating how so small beings can fly distances of many kilometers when they are only a millimeter in size.
- Comment on spoopy figs 1 week ago:
I don’t think that’s true. Apparently even Aristotle has spoken about fig wasps (without really understanding what they are or do of course). And it seems like all fig trees are dependent on this kind of pollination.
- Comment on spoopy figs 1 week ago:
Yeah sure I’ll eat figs. You don’t eat the fig wasps as they have been eaten by the fig already. If I knew there was a fig wasp still inside, I wouldn’t eat it though.
- Comment on spoopy figs 1 week ago:
Yes exactly. They are both dependent on each other in that way.
And to add on to that, figs are super important food trees in the tropics, because they are the only trees that produce fruits all year around. (Because they have to, otherwise the fig wasp population couldn’t sustain itself.) So many animal species are also dependent on the steady food source of fig trees (btw most look very different from the common fig tree, Ficus carica).
- Comment on Dear Faith IX 1 week ago:
Oof, this whole email exchange reads super misogynistic, but this one here in particular! Poor Faith :(
- Comment on Dear Faith IX 1 week ago:
I think what that means is that both AI and language learners often use more formal language. If you are learning a new language you usually start by visiting classes or other formal and structured resources. But native speakers don’t actually use that idealized form of language very much. I guess that the training set of AI was mostly texts written in more formal language and/or that there isn’t a strong enough consistent bias for most informal language.
- Comment on thx for the diabeetus 1 week ago:
Especially because most of the corn eaten in the rest of the Americas isn’t sweet at all. It’s more equivalent of rice, pasta, potatoes, etc…
- Comment on Final words revealed? 2 weeks ago:
Oooh, nice!!
- Comment on Diphalia 2 weeks ago:
Cool! And it mentions “Inside Nature’s Giants”!!
- Comment on PSA 1 month ago:
I feel like something similar has been going on a few years ago as well (or maybe it’s an old post?)
- Comment on PSA 1 month ago:
It is a valid term used by trans people to describe their own feelings (see the gender dysphoria bible for example) The other person must have gotten something mixed up…
- Comment on It's a Furby! 1 month ago:
Wow, I loved this! Thanks for sharing <3
- Comment on Goldenrod 1 month ago:
Just use its Latin name, Solidago. How am I supposed to know what it is called in English when each other language also has its own name.
- Comment on On Monoculture 1 month ago:
What’s genetic monoculture then? Wouldn’t that be identical to just monoculture? Or is it having the same crop, but different genetic variants on the same field for multiple years?
- Comment on Lawks 1 month ago:
I’ve taken many pictures of copulating insects and I always feel weird doing that. But for identification purposes it’s great…
- Comment on Breed back better, or whatever Biden said 2 months ago:
What isn’t iconic in nature though? Plants also have turned into similar looking herbs and shrubs over and over again. Or look at epiphytes! If there is an available niche it will get filled. And since plants all start with more or less the same basics, they fill it similarly. Evolution likes to repurpose stuff.
- Comment on In 2015, the Fortingall Yew, one of the oldest trees in Europe, decided trans rights are tree rights and switched its sex to female 🏳️⚧️ eat shit transphobes 2 months ago:
Well, plants really don’t have to deal with our binary bullshit. Most of them don’t have any sex because they have perfect flowers anyways, meaning their flowers have male and female gametes.
- Comment on Ya yeet! 3 months ago:
Funnily enough, I just watched this very informative video on why the lactase-producing gene is actually not necessary at all for you to eat and digest dairy. If your gur biome can digest lactose, you are completely fine ;)
Also, it feels intuitive to think that there are these genetic differences between Europeans and Asians etc. But this is much more complex than you would think. Humans are much more diverse genetically, especially people from Africa. If you test whole populations of people you can maybe see some generic trends, but this does not help predict anything on an individual level. There is way too much variation possible for you to reliably predict a person’s genome. And as hinted above, the genetic variation is much higher on the African continent, where populations are genetically more similar to populations outside of Africa then to other populations in Africa. That’s why there is zero biological basis to racism btw, it is a social construct in its entirety!
Analogous to this is the difference between sexes. The variation within one sex is much higher than between sexes. And also, there is so much fuzziness in how we classify sexes with a plethora of edge cases. That’s why sexism and gender stereotypes are also just social constructs and don’t rely on biological reality.
So saying anything about the bloodline of your child really is meaningless. Unless we’re speaking of individual genetic differences passed down from your ancestors. Then you could calculate certain probabilities based on larger population data how likely it is that your child may have some genetic diseases etc. But even then you wouldn’t know if it first actually had a certain genetic mutation and secondly if this mutation will be expressed throughout your child’s life. So this is also not really predictive…
- Comment on Ya yeet! 3 months ago:
Yeah, that one is really weird!
As a biologist, my first thought would maybe be what physiological needs my child has and how it will interact with the natural environment. And what strange foods it could potentially eat.
- Comment on Honestly wtf? 3 months ago:
Oh wow, didn’t know that! :O
- Comment on zingiberales 3 months ago:
Glad you could get something out of it :)
I’m not a teacher, just very passionate about biology and pretty active on iNaturalist. That’s where the vast majority of my knowledge of taxonomy comes from. Definitely a recommendation for everyone who is curious about their environment (no prior knowledge needed)
- Comment on zingiberales 3 months ago:
These are different branches on the tree of life, specifically within the plants. If you imagine this tree of life, species would be the tips of the smallest branches. And the branches itself would be different units (=taxa) that lead to various branches. So in taxonomy we use special words for these different units/taxa dependent on how far back they are removed from the species. Like, you may have heard of a genus. For example we as humans are the species Homo sapiens and our genus is the first part of that: Homo. There were also other species in that genus, like the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) or the Denisovans (Homo denisova). This works the same in plants. For example ginger is actually the species Zingiber officinale. There are also other gingers, like Zingiber spectabile. If we go one level up the branch, we reach the family ginger is in: Zingiberaceae. In this “ginger family” we have other plants of different genera like turmeric (Curcuma longa) or cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum). Notice how the first word of these species isn’t Zingiberales, because they are in other genera. So, Zingiber is more closely related to any other Zingiber than it is to the other plants in Zingiberaceae. And one level above, Zingiber is more closely related to any plant in the Zingiberaceae than to any other plant. Taxonomy is based on who evolved from whom, that’s why it is important what are the closest relatives to a given species.
This is fundamentally what taxonomy is about. From there on we can go up the branches of the tree of life and explore the branches that connect to even more species. If we go up one major level from the family we reach the “order” (I’m simplifying here, taxonomy is much more intricate than that). An order of plants contains various families and the OP spoke of the order Zingiberales (ending in -ales). The “words” I’ve used are families (ending in -aceae) as you might have expected from Zingiberaceae above. And the families I’ve listed in the first half are all within the same order of Zingiberales. These are all very common ornamental or otherwise cultivated plants. You may know Marantaceae as calantheas/goeppertias/prayer plants, Heliconiaceae as lobster-claws. Other important members of this order are also bananas (Musaceae).
In the second half of my comment I talk about Poales and seaweeds not being Spermatophyta. So, Poales as you might have guessed from the ending is a separate order of plants. In it are most prominently the grasses (Poaceae) OP spoke about in their post. And seaweeds not even being Spermatophyta means they aren’t even seed plants.
I hope this explains it :)
- Comment on zingiberales 3 months ago:
Woah, what? Even Marantaceae, Costaceae and Heliconiaceae??
As others have pointed out, the second to last panel doesn’t make much sense. There are officially only 8 families in the Zingiberales. Poaceae are obviously in the Poales and seaweeds are not even Spermatophyta… If you meant seagrasses then those are in the Alismatales, so in a different monocot order.
- Comment on *confused flatfish noises* 3 months ago:
Hm, in small animals my previous point of a 2D vs 3D space is also valid. Large land prey animals “only” have to look from side to side to spot predators. Small animals have to look in all 3 dimensions, like sharks
- Comment on *confused flatfish noises* 3 months ago:
Haha, I’m not a bird person and didn’t bother to look it up. Thanks for the correction!
- Comment on DISORDERED SUPERORDER 3 months ago:
Cuuuute!!!
- Comment on True and real. 3 months ago:
That’s basically correct, yes! The baby parts are the gametophytes and they then use their male and female parts to produce a new zygote, which will grow into a sporophyte. This sporophyte is what we know as a fern. It will produce and finally release many many spores, which are the “airdrop baby parts”.
- Comment on *confused flatfish noises* 3 months ago:
They also have to orient themselves in a truely 3D landscape, unlike terrestrial predators who hunt on basically a 2D plane. Birds of prey (with the exception of owls) also don’t have front-facing eyes, probably for similar reasons (and they’re stereoscopic vision also works a bit different I think with very different points of focus).