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  1. - Top - End - #31
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    Default Re: Implausible Science: How can this be true?

    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    has anyone said unusual wind patterns yet? Perhaps the air is very still near the ground and stronger higher up, giving an advantage to spore dispersal when said spores are released from high up.

    Alternately, it could be the result of selective breeding or genetic engineering.
    Regardless of whether the wind is stronger higher up or not, being released from higher will result in the spores being carried farther by whatever amount of wind there is.
    Imagine throwing a paper airplane. Which will go farther before hitting the ground, the one you throw from ground level or the one you throw from atop a building?

  2. - Top - End - #32
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    Default Re: Implausible Science: How can this be true?

    What about the shrooms being so massive that the caps are able to support traditional plants? Or there are trees so massive like baobabs of Yggdrasil proportions so fungi take over most of the ground cover with traditional photosynthetics snatching up the sunlight filtering through the baobab branches.

    Massive disaster with lots of biological detris and fungi being the first to benefit but for whatever reason (radiation! magic! magical radiation!) keep growing. Eventually dirt and debris form atop and begat a photosynthetic forest. As more traditional plants grow skyward, they create their own niche and choke out most competition from the actual floor since its rather shady and humid at the surface.

    Kinda like an above ground Underdark but with room for more Underdark.

    Maybe the fungi and plants have a mutual symbiosis like mentioned elsewhere. The fungi provides temporary height advantage for the plants, which has results in a root like system growing downwards providing a "cage" support for the mushrooms. Maybe even share a circulatory system. Both the root system and the mushroom provide water and nutrients but the photosynthesis likewise provides nutrients but also protection.

    I guess I'm kind of imagining something like the trees in a swamp but close to the water's surface, fungi flourish. They provide mostly flat surfaces for other things to grow on like I mentioned earlier. Maybe like a mangrove? In which case, maybe the fungi is the only thing that lives in the brackish water.
    Last edited by Klaatu B. Nikto; 2017-05-22 at 10:50 AM.
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  3. - Top - End - #33
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    Default Re: Implausible Science: How can this be true?

    how about some giant mushrooms full of holes, like morels, but on a grand scale. Animals could live and nest in the holes. Some might be colony forming animals like bees that would protect the morel. Or snakes and spiders and monkeys and other vicious beasts. Could have the mushroom feed on the droppings of the animals that nest in them.

  4. - Top - End - #34
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    Default Re: Implausible Science: How can this be true?

    Quote Originally Posted by tantric View Post
    mushrooms, by which i mean the fruiting body, exist only to disperse spores.

    fungi are part of mutualistic relationships with many plants called mycorhizae hmm. most people use 'symbiotic' when they mean 'mutualistic'. symbiotic means sharing a living space - tapeworms are symbionts. i suspect that only matters to ecologists. anyway, the fungi that form relationships with trees are classic mushrooms. they're ectomychorhizae because unlike the others, their mycelia doesn't actually penetrate the plants. these basically take sugar from the plants and supply trace minerals, garnered from their forest wide mycelial networks. they do a lot more, too, but not relevant here.

    ah, now speculative evolution and ecology. thank you for this. it's not uncommon to have species of nonterrestrial origen on game worlds,, be they extraplanar or just alien. ectomycorhizae mostly use animals to disperse their spores by providing a tasty mushroom snack. but if the fungi were basically innately poisonous, this wouldn't work (millipedes eat destroying angels). perhaps they have evolved from dinoflagellates, the protists that cause red tides and aren't really fungi at all. the natural solution is to offer their poisons to trees in return for spore production. i'd guess that only the woody parts and buds would be toxic, leaves are too expendable. i'm not sure this is going anywhere...
    It seems that schools might not be teaching that the same way anymore. Back when i was in grade school they set up a spectrum of symbiotic to parasitic, for when a creature lives so close to another that it's dependent upon it (or both may be dependent upon each other,) basically for metabolism or homeostasis type tasks. They probably also brought up mutualists, but kids often focus on one thing to the exclusion of the other, so I can't say quite how they presented it, except to say that it was brief. College coursework is where I actually remember the kinds of things I learned in regards to that, though that's also fading from memory so I've only got hints of the Lotka-Volterra model and some faint notion of using the same math as predator prey isoclines...

    But the point of this, is that folks talking about symbiosis aren't necessarily talking about the same model where your symbionts include parasites. I was inclined to think that were just mistaken, but I've been seeing the word used like that lately, so I'm suspecting the textbooks changed at some point.

    Quote Originally Posted by Balyano View Post
    How about if first a rather small trunk grows. Then shelf fungi colonize it.

    -snip-
    Where it's fungus you kind of expect it to attach any old spot, but if this goes on for awhile maybe there's a particular nodule the shelves need in order to take root. This benefits the shelf because the plant can make sure that the weight is relatively evenly distributed along the trunk, and this gives the trunk some further control in the case of overly parasitic shelf segments (much easier to pinch off the nodule and starve them if they're not behaving themselves.) Some species of fig trees actually have a relationship like this, where a wasp comes and lays eggs in their fruits. They pinch off a fruit if there were zero eggs laid in it, as this indicates that the fruit was low quality, and they pinch off the fruit if it had too many eggs laid in it, because that wasp was greedy and screw your babies if you're not going to give my babies a chance.

    Quote Originally Posted by Balyano View Post
    how about some giant mushrooms full of holes, like morels, but on a grand scale. Animals could live and nest in the holes. Some might be colony forming animals like bees that would protect the morel. Or snakes and spiders and monkeys and other vicious beasts. Could have the mushroom feed on the droppings of the animals that nest in them.
    Well, between somebody mentioning the caps providing shade, and that mention of the Acacia trees, I got thinking about Acacia shrubs. These have a mutualistic relationship with a particular ant species, who hollow out this little blister-like pods on the stems of the shrub. This seems like a loss for the plant so far, but when any large grazing animals show up to try and munch on the shrub, they get a swarm of angry ants in their face. This seems like a pretty good deal already, but the ants also know better than to eat their home, so they travel down to the ground and eat all of the nearby plants that would have been competing with this shrub. Two pretty big wins for the shrub now. Life is, as always, really complex and weird; there's actually a vegetarian spider that eats these shrubs. Because they have that ant protection the plant has gone a little lax on the whole "being made out of poison and indigestible wood" thing, and so their new growth is actually really high quality food stuff, compared to other plants anyway. The spiders crawl around chewing on those bits, then just jump away whenever the ants start to close in on them. When they get the chance they also eat ant larvae.

    So how does this relate? Well, your dense forests that cast a lot of shade are always this sort of tug of war with your grazing herds. If the trees get big enough they are pretty much immune to being eaten by those animals (unless your world has an inordinate fondness of giraffes,) but trees do eventually die and fires wipe out big swaths of forest some of the time, so there's always going to be this period where a bunch of shrub sized plants have little defense against the raging hordes- err, herds. Having something like ant colonies that actively defend the perimeter of some particular area of super-fungus growth would greatly aid in establishing those huge towering caps that shade out the rest of the place (and presumably speed up the growth substantially,) but more likely than not, some other sort of creature is going to find a way to insert themselves into the gap this has left in the local food web.

    In fantasy settings we tend to think of mushrooms as being highly toxic and releasing all sorts of nasty spores, but lets draw on that other mention of parasites we had recently: zombie spores. Now instead of the ants having a symbiotic relationship with the little fungus-shrubs when one of these forests tries to take root, the mushrooms are trying to grow tall as fast as they can so that their spores will reach local ant colonies (or some other sort of colony. Could be friggin Ankhegs if you think that sounds cool,) and they want to enslave these warrior bugs to patrol the perimeter of their growth to keep anything from eating them before their trunks are too big and too indigestible, until their succulent new growth is out of reach of grazing herds.

    I got kind of anthropomorphic with the instinctual and chemical behaviors of fungus there, but holy **** does this ever sound like the start of a really cool ecosystem.

  5. - Top - End - #35
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    Default Re: Implausible Science: How can this be true?

    Quote Originally Posted by Zorku View Post
    It seems that schools might not be teaching that the same way anymore. Back when i was in grade school they set up a spectrum of symbiotic to parasitic, for when a creature lives so close to another that it's dependent upon it (or both may be dependent upon each other,) basically for metabolism or homeostasis type tasks. They probably also brought up mutualists, but kids often focus on one thing to the exclusion of the other, so I can't say quite how they presented it, except to say that it was brief. College coursework is where I actually remember the kinds of things I learned in regards to that, though that's also fading from memory so I've only got hints of the Lotka-Volterra model and some faint notion of using the same math as predator prey isoclines...

    But the point of this, is that folks talking about symbiosis aren't necessarily talking about the same model where your symbionts include parasites. I was inclined to think that were just mistaken, but I've been seeing the word used like that lately, so I'm suspecting the textbooks changed at some point.
    In my schooling in both 4th grade and later in college we were taught that Mutualism, Commensalism, and Parasitism are all sub-types of Symbiosis. So it is not incorrect to say ''symbiosis'' when ''mutualism'' is more precise.

  6. - Top - End - #36
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    Default Re: Implausible Science: How can this be true?

    Quote Originally Posted by Balyano View Post
    In my schooling in both 4th grade and later in college we were taught that Mutualism, Commensalism, and Parasitism are all sub-types of Symbiosis. So it is not incorrect to say ''symbiosis'' when ''mutualism'' is more precise.
    In that model? Yes. In the papers people were writing back in the 50s? Not so much.

    "Symbiotic" does refer to the same thing as "mutualism" when you're talking to certain scientists. I haven't sussed out the entire etymology of the word overnight, but my rough estimate is that it's an older usage of the word that is not yet archaic. You're probably in the right if you criticize somebody for being behind the times in their lingo for using it this way, but if I've got this right, they're not outright misusing the term.

    It kind of sucks that we don't learn any of the recent history of fields like this, but at the same time there's just so much material there that I get why they condense it down to almost all vocabulary in grade schools, and modestly more function in early college courses.

  7. - Top - End - #37
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    Default Re: Implausible Science: How can this be true?

    Quote Originally Posted by Zorku View Post
    In that model? Yes. In the papers people were writing back in the 50s? Not so much.

    "Symbiotic" does refer to the same thing as "mutualism" when you're talking to certain scientists. I haven't sussed out the entire etymology of the word overnight, but my rough estimate is that it's an older usage of the word that is not yet archaic. You're probably in the right if you criticize somebody for being behind the times in their lingo for using it this way, but if I've got this right, they're not outright misusing the term.

    It kind of sucks that we don't learn any of the recent history of fields like this, but at the same time there's just so much material there that I get why they condense it down to almost all vocabulary in grade schools, and modestly more function in early college courses.
    I'd bet money that the distinction between symbiosis and mutualism arose out of an etymological genetic fallacy; ie. insistence that "symbiosis" conform to the literal meaning of its root words

    EDIT:
    I think I gave the wrong name for that fallacy; the genetic/etymological fallacy is different.

    But what's the word for insisting on literal interpretation of root words then?
    Last edited by Bohandas; 2017-05-26 at 05:33 PM.
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  8. - Top - End - #38
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    Default Re: Implausible Science: How can this be true?

    A wiki-quicky gives:

    Pierre-Joseph van Beneden introduced the term "commensalism" in 1876.

    The term "mutualism" was introduced by Pierre-Joseph van Beneden in 1876.



    and for symbiosis

    In 1879, Heinrich Anton de Bary defined it as "the living together of unlike organisms".

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    Default Re: Implausible Science: How can this be true?

    I can imagine some developing mushrooms that bud from the side of the trunk like fruit.

    These mushrooms stay closed and do not release their spores.

    Animals eat these brightly colored ''fruit''.

    The act of digestion releases the spores into their intestinal tract.

    A short time later the spores find themselves in a pile of fertilizer some distance from the ''tree''.

    Some species may have spores with hooks that catch the insides of the intestines.

    By the time the hooks break or dissolve the animal has carried them many miles.

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    Default Re: Implausible Science: How can this be true?

    It's not just acacia that's different from other trees. Oak trees are more closely related to roses than pines.

    Being tree-shaped is advantageous for a wide variety of plants and was independently evolved many many times.

    I don't think the vitamins explanation is a good one; whatever it is that the mushroom needs as a vitamin has to be something that is so difficult (evolutionarily speaking) for the mushroom to "learn" to produce itself that growing into a giant mushroom tree is easier, which means it has to be, like, an entirely different category of compound than anything the mushroom produces (nitrogen, for instance, is easy to work with biologically unless you have to break an N-N triple bond, and in that case only a few specialized organisms, mostly bacteria, do that at all; you'd need a similar thing for mushrooms)

    The HS explanation is clever. I don't know if it's energetically plausible, but it's certainly clever.

  11. - Top - End - #41
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    Default Re: Implausible Science: How can this be true?

    3 ideas:

    1. The mushroom trees grow so big because at a certain biomass they start generating their own power (like heat in the human body), and need more mass to keep up this secondary fuel system.

    2. The mushroom trees grow so big because they are sapient, and more mass means more can be allocated to Brain Power!

    3. The God(dess) of Fungi has a competitive streak a mile wide and it's all funneled into his/her feud with his/her big sister, the Goddess of Plants.
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  12. - Top - End - #42
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    Default Re: Implausible Science: How can this be true?

    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    I'd bet money that the distinction between symbiosis and mutualism arose out of an etymological genetic fallacy; ie. insistence that "symbiosis" conform to the literal meaning of its root words

    EDIT:
    I think I gave the wrong name for that fallacy; the genetic/etymological fallacy is different.

    But what's the word for insisting on literal interpretation of root words then?
    The genetic fallacy is the formal fallacy, the etymology fallacy is the informal fallacy that refers to the specific thing you're talking about.

    Interesting take on how this happened, but I think I'll stick with my "an entire scientific field gradually adjusts what they mean with their words, and branches of a field often get isolated from each other and drift in different directions." Until any of us runs into somebody that was actually there, or saw high school textbook writers waffle back and forth on the terminology, we're all just speculating anyway.
    *second and third hand accounts qualify for this, but I'm not really plugged into the research community for ecology. I've got a few old professors I could write to, but they get so much email I'm not likely to hear back from them.

    Quote Originally Posted by Balyano View Post
    I can imagine some developing mushrooms that bud from the side of the trunk like fruit.

    These mushrooms stay closed and do not release their spores.

    Animals eat these brightly colored ''fruit''.

    The act of digestion releases the spores into their intestinal tract.

    A short time later the spores find themselves in a pile of fertilizer some distance from the ''tree''.

    Some species may have spores with hooks that catch the insides of the intestines.

    By the time the hooks break or dissolve the animal has carried them many miles.
    Sticking with the fruit concept...

    My girlfriend wanted to pursue a different angle on the ankheg forest patrol idea. As presented in the manual a grown ankheg isn't much in need of shelter like the acacia shrug provides, but getting high in between meals could easily become a habit. If you still want to go with the spore zombie route, this gives the bugs a long exposure to spores, which may be minimally infectious, but enough to eventually do the job. Depending on how tight you want this relationship to be, this can have a variety of effects on the creatures, but in the habit of parasitoid wasps, I rather like the idea of a bug that grows much larger than it ought to (more desperate need to consume prey in the area,) until the body finally gives out and the parasite eats up what's left. At the center of each of these mushroom forests, I imagine you can find the first mushroom-tree, which erupted out of the chitinous remains of an enormous mantis-roach monstrosity.

    Quote Originally Posted by Beneath View Post
    It's not just acacia that's different from other trees. Oak trees are more closely related to roses than pines.

    Being tree-shaped is advantageous for a wide variety of plants and was independently evolved many many times.

    I don't think the vitamins explanation is a good one; whatever it is that the mushroom needs as a vitamin has to be something that is so difficult (evolutionarily speaking) for the mushroom to "learn" to produce itself that growing into a giant mushroom tree is easier, which means it has to be, like, an entirely different category of compound than anything the mushroom produces (nitrogen, for instance, is easy to work with biologically unless you have to break an N-N triple bond, and in that case only a few specialized organisms, mostly bacteria, do that at all; you'd need a similar thing for mushrooms)

    The HS explanation is clever. I don't know if it's energetically plausible, but it's certainly clever.
    Not exactly. A lot of the most basic cellular chemistry takes quite awhile to evolve, and then once you integrate that into your metabolic pathways it's even harder to evolve workarounds to survive without it. It's fairly rare to see cells of any kind evolve the ability to consume a new type of material (even though we can provoke such evolution in a laboratory setting at this point,) and when they do that it's very "single step" where they use a gene that was already for something very similar, and they just have to snap off part of the protein to get something that sort of works for this (and presumably refine that over the next thousand generations until it's actually good.) Vitamins don't tend to work like that, and although you can heavily modify a protein that takes part in the chemistry for creating those compounds, and still ave it do its job, it's a lot messier to create that in the first place.

    So, most living things have metabolic pathways for producing most of their vitamin-like compounds on their own. Scurvy just isn't a thing that happens to most of the animal kingdom (except under some other conditions where you prevent vitamin synthesis,) but in our lineage there was this period where we ate so much fruit, all day, every day, that when some mutant came along with broken genes for making compounds that the fruit was loaded with, you couldn't tell them apart from anybody else. One two, skip a few, and one day, genetic drift had passed those faulty genes around through the entire population. Everybody that can trace themselves back through that population has to get their vitamin C from their food- which isn't usually a big deal; you've got to have a really strange diet not to run into some vitamin C, even before we started enriching breakfast cereal with the stuff.

    Most trees are in the same place with nitrogen fixing bacteria. The nitrogen is right there in the air that they're constantly pulling almost all of their body mass out of, but because these bacteria were so prevalent for their ancestors their body plan just takes it as a given that they'll suck up basic organic nitrogen a-plenty around their roots. When populations spring up without such great access to nitrogen, they don't just evolve the ability to do it on their own. This stuff is too critical for them to easily evolve without a source of the stuff, and when they do evolve a workaround it's always been some lower hanging fruit, like creating nodules to protect the bacteria they need, or any of the pitcher plant type species that get their nitrogen compounds from dissolving bugs. You look at the chemical reaction on paper and nitrogen chemistry isn't all that tricky, but chemistry that's so basic that your body plan takes it for advantage is just really hard to evolve, even when you've got a bunch of gene fragments kicking around in your DNA that already have most of the parts you need. Muller's ratchet just doesn't click in that direction.

    Bacteria tend to figure this stuff out given a hundred thousand years, almost more by chance than by selection, but multicellular life does basically all of their evolution by playing around with the proteins that deal with cell communication. They have the same cellular machinery as bacteria (for the most part,) but the start and end of every cascading reaction plugs into some protein that sticks out of the membrane, so that other cells have some say in when it starts, or what else happens when it stops.

  13. - Top - End - #43
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    Default Re: Implausible Science: How can this be true?

    A possible explanation would be predation - spores don't spread well from mushrooms that have been eaten, and the large mushrooms could be adapted to deal with a local ground feeder - they have some sort of armored side (lots and lots of some sort of tough biopolymer), and they grow to their large size with an armored top, which they then shed once tall enough to protect them from the ground feeder. Said ground feeder didn't get bigger in the process as the rest of their food was still low enough that the metabolic cost of growth exceeded the benefit.
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