Unicellular "Enigma" Changes From Predator To Plant and Back 168
SilverEar writes "Imagine a creature that swims and preys on others, but once it eats a certain kind of plant, that plant grows inside it, causing the predator to lose its ability to prey and start using sunlight to make its food. Its preying mouth is replaced by an eye that is needed to find sunlight. This is the Hatena ('enigma' in Japanese). The kicker: when Hatena reproduces, one offspring is a peaceful photosynthesizer with the sun-seeking eye, while the other is yet again a predator with a voracious mouth."
PETA will be confused (Score:5, Funny)
Re:PETA will be confused (Score:5, Funny)
Easy solution: they will demand that plants possess the same rights as animals. Since they already demand that animals possess the same rights as humans, it will then follow that they will choose not to eat plant-based food just as they refuse to eat animal-based food (i.e., meat). This will leave them without a source of food, and the smart ones will abandon the cause while the dumb ones will die off.
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"Smart" isnÂt exactly the kind of adjective one should ever use to describe PETA members.
Re:PETA will be confused (Score:5, Interesting)
No, not the same rights as humans, just the same rights as pets. Even this is an oversimplification but I think it gets the point across.
The point being that it is not appropriate to speak of animals having all the same rights as humans. I think this is well understood. The right to vote, for example, does not make sense since it presupposes knowledge of language, politics, issues etc. The rights that PETA members ascribe to animals, most basically, are the rights not to suffer and die at the hands of humans. These aren't that far out, when you consider the "arguments" in favor of the suffering and dying.
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The rights that PETA members ascribe to animals, most basically, are the rights not to suffer and die at the hands of humans.
They have a good point there. Animals suffering and dying in the mouths/claws of other animals makes for more entertaining documentaries.
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Depending on their region or ethnic diet, having dog or cat meat to eat themselves isn't out of the question.
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Would anyone deny their cat or dog meat to eat ? .. It's as if animals should get more rights than a human.
(Most?) animals don't have the logical or ethical capacity to even ask themselves the question of whether they should be eating meat or not. They often get away with rape too, but does that mean that humans should?
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A quick Google will reveal people suggesting the same of the Chinese, just because their culture is different. Another (or perhaps the same) quick Google will reveal many people who said (and do say) the same of slaves.
It's very simple: if it can be hurt and we think hurting sucks, then it should have as much rights as you not to be hurt, because, all other issues aside, YOU will suffer for hurting something
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So we should prohibit causing the suffering of humans and animals, but what about plants?
When you tear off a leaf, a rapid cascade of hormones is set off in the plant, causing the plant to react to the damage and start healing.
When you injure an animal, it sets off a rapid cascade of hormones causing the animal to react to the damage and start h
Re:PETA will be confused (Score:5, Insightful)
Given PETA's record, your statement is a bit . . . ironic.
http://www.petakillsanimals.com/ [petakillsanimals.com]
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Well, I've heard this one before and I have a couple of things to say about it. First, you can read PETA's response to this at their forum [peta.org]. I admit that posts by PETA admins are very likely to be pro-PETA, but this is in contrast to your source, a website called petakillsanimals. I don't think it will be hard to sort the bias from just facts. The PETA response provides a context that is not presented by the petakillsanimals page, which you can evaluate for yourself. The (my) tldr version of this is: PE
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Carrot Juice is Murder:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmK0bZl4ILM [youtube.com]
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Au contraire! Have you ever considered the health benefits of an all-mushroom diet? Fungus varieties for every occasion: portabella, morels, white mushrooms, chanterelles, etc.
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Except at that point it will be morally acceptable for vegetarians to eat them.
Scientific American (Score:5, Informative)
For all those interested, Scientific American [scientificamerican.com] has the story.
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Actually once this cell totally integrates this endosymbiotic lifeform (the next step) it might very well become eukaryotic. Ironically that would make it an eukaryotic plant, which would presumably very easily evolve back into a predator.
when Hatena reproduces, one offspring is a peaceful photosynthesizer with the sun-seeking eye, while the other is yet again a predator with a voracious mouth."
The explanation is simple : cell division in the parent organism does not trigger cell division in the endosymbiotic lifeform. That endosymbiotic lifeform might very well be thought of as an infection.
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What on earth are you talking about? Do you even know what you are saying? Are you implying that plants are not eukaryotic? What the hell do you mean by "evolve"? Why would it have genes for producing an eye if it was regarded as an infection? Gods damn you!! It's sad that I am the only person here that recognizes you have just used biology jargon and pokemon logic to explain this.
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You're obviously right, plants are eukaryotic. Sorry.
Why would it have genes for producing an eye if it was regarded as an infection?
How exactly would you call a lifeform that changes the operation of a target cell for it's own benefit ?
Evolution theory is more and more saying that genes spread by viruses, and we have little trouble calling those infections, no matter how useful they are in any particular case. So why feel inhibited calling this an infection ?
Here's what happens. You have a virus ... any virus. It contains a series of advanced genes. Probably copied from it's previous
Re:PETA will be confused (Score:5, Funny)
This thing sounds worse than a Politician to me.
Fixed that for you.
Re:PETA will be confused (Score:4, Funny)
I suspect politicians are simply a colony of these. Their campaigning certainly is preditory, and once they get into office, they become vegetables.
Every 4 years they shed their sessile nature and hit the campaign trail again.
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It's basically an argument from ignorance -- or rather, an appeal to "common sense".
Ok, yes, appeal to common sense can be done well, but there are things to which common sense just doesn't apply, and we actually have to use critical thought and science.
Example: Common sense tells you light doesn't travel, it's just instantaneous. When you flip a light switch, light is just on. However, no one questions when science tells us that light does travel.
Common sense can't even begin to grasp the weirdness that gr
Re:PETA will be confused (Score:4, Informative)
journal link (Score:5, Informative)
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credit card here: https://pubs.aaas.org/membership/new_member_setup.asp [aaas.org]
and you can have it.
Public Service Announcement (Score:5, Funny)
This is your creator deity... And this is your creator deity on drugs.
Re:Public Service Announcement (Score:5, Funny)
I've known that since the momemt I heard about the platypus.
I still have this image of God and Devil sitting in a bar at the end of the universe, had a few beer, God doodles the platypus on a napkin and Devil manages to snort out a "dare ya!" between giggles.
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Which somehow brings us to Spore. [vgcats.com]
Ugh (Score:5, Funny)
Sound like my wife
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Sound like my wife
What's my father in law doing browsing Slashdot?
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so at least you can bang her sun bathing sister, rite?
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You sir are lucky...my wife only has the predator aspect...and shes usually preying on my wallet.
She'd need the eye to find the green, though.
Sounds like the foundation for a 5-volume fantasy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like the foundation for a 5-volume fanta (Score:4, Funny)
Please. Not so loud. Fox is looking for a sitcom theme for next season.
Is this your blog? (Score:5, Insightful)
While this is extremely interesting, we need a link to the actual journal article, or to some source material, not just a link to a blog. Without that we can only assume this is an attempt to turf slashdot to drive traffic to your blog and generate ad revenues.
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It's alright, we killed it.
The site, I mean - not the wacky organism...
Re:Is this your blog? (Score:4, Insightful)
Okamoto, N. (2005). A Secondary Symbiosis in Progress? Science, 310 (5746), 287-287 DOI: 10.1126/science.1116125 OKAMOTO, N., & INOUYE, I. (2006). Hatena arenicola gen. et sp. nov., a Katablepharid Undergoing Probable Plastid Acquisition Protist, 157 (4), 401-419 DOI: 10.1016/j.protis.2006.05.011
Also, whereas blogs are freely-available, you need a subscription to read the journal article -- so I think that the way this was done is the best way.
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While this is extremely interesting, we need a link to the actual journal article, or to some source material, not just a link to a blog. Without that we can only assume this is an attempt to turf slashdot to drive traffic to your blog and generate ad revenues.
1) The blog has no ads 2) The links to the original article are in the end of the post 3) How do you expect to understand an article in a scientific journal, when your reading skills are so obviously lacking as to not notice (1) and (2)
Why does this sound so familiar? (Score:2, Funny)
Cordyceps (Score:4, Informative)
Memeaholic (Score:5, Funny)
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I for one welcome our new single celled predatory overlords, but deride their single celled hippy photosynthesizing cousins.
Phylumist!
What happens when chloroplasts are removed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Biology is full of promoter-inhibitor relationships, and this seems like an interesting one. When the algae is inside the protist, the host's "animal" behaviors and anatomy are suppressed, but they clearly remain in a latent state, ready to reactivate after fission. It makes one wonder to what extent chloroplasts remain as endosymbionts versus organelles in genuine plant species. So . . .
. . .
Does anyone know of any research where chloroplasts were removed from plant cells in culture, to see if the remaining cells revert to some atavistic animal-like exogenous-food-seeking state?
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Doesn't happen -- they're endosymbionts. Without chloroplasts/mitochondria regular plant/animal cells can't function -- no electron transport chain. That's why people with mitochondrial myopathy are sick, as their mitochondria don't work properly so they don't make enough ATP.
The chloroplasts/mitochondria have outsourced amino acid production (among other things), so without the host, they can't survive.
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Correct, that is our conventional understanding of things. But what if there are other primitive energy capture and translation systems that remain repressed or down regulated by the presence of these structures? What if a cell could be kept on "life support" for a few hours or days after removing its mitochondria or chloroplasts, enough for up regulation of latent genes that will revert the cell back into a some sort bacteria-like mode of metabolism? Granted, it is much less likely for advanced eukaryot
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Plants w/o chloroplasts. I remember something from biology where they keep some corn alive that is hybrid for a critical gene--if missing the chloroplasts don't divide. If self-crossed, one-fourth of the corn is albino and dies as soon as it runs out of stored energy in the seed.
However, see Indian Pipe [wikipedia.org] for a plant that doesn't have chloroplasts.
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Fascinating. Thanks !
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Incorrect. Plant cells have both chloroplasts and mitochondria. Removal/inactivation of the chloroplasts wouldn't kill the cell as long as it was supplied with food for the mitochondria.
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Human cancer cells can survive outside the body. They act rather differently.
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Strictly speaking you are certainly right. Any human cells can survive outside the body in tissue culture. However, the information I can find [anl.gov] suggests that normally they die off in just the same way as normal human cells so they can't normally survive outside the body.
Do you have a better reference for this?
Re:What happens when chloroplasts are removed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, you are exactly correct, that sticking chloroplasts into animal cells would be the necessary flip side of that experiment.
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I was not referring to turning pine trees into Night of the Living Dead. What would be interesting is to see what would happen to algae under these circumstances, or to cultures of moss cells or flowering plant cells. Pick a popular research plant - tobacco for instance - and then pull the chloroplasts out of a few cells, then stick them into a cell culture medium - e.g. agar petri dishes or mammalian cell culture flasks - and see if they become planktonic, aggressive, nutrient-tropic, or if they start to express cell surface structures or other organelles related to sensing and locomotion. Since the algae are phylogenetically much closer to all of this, it seems plausible that they might revert to animal-like forms and function.
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If nobody has ever done these experiments, now would be a good time.
I hate to admit... (Score:5, Funny)
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But when I read the article summary, one of the first questions on my mind was... How does it interact with Japanese schoolgirls?
Why, with tentacles ofcourse!
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The eye (or mouth, depending on where it is in the life cycle) is replaced with a tentacle.
Gives a whole new meaning to... (Score:3, Funny)
Advantageous Evolutionary trait (Score:2, Interesting)
Food (Score:2)
After ingesting the algae, this mouth disappears. Instead, it is replaced by an eyespot from the algae. The eyespot is a light sensing organelle, a very primitive eye that guides algae to light sources. In this case, it also guides the host, Hatena, to light. Hatena has obvioulsy stopped feeding, and least through its mouth. It is now swimming to the light, letting the alga photosynthesize its food for both of them.
Doesn't that quality the hatena as a parasite?
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After ingesting the algae, this mouth disappears. Instead, it is replaced by an eyespot from the algae. The eyespot is a light sensing organelle, a very primitive eye that guides algae to light sources. In this case, it also guides the host, Hatena, to light. Hatena has obvioulsy stopped feeding, and least through its mouth. It is now swimming to the light, letting the alga photosynthesize its food for both of them.
Doesn't that quality the hatena as a parasite?
No, I believe you're referring to "Parisians".
OT, but just FYI (Score:5, Informative)
Old news (Score:5, Funny)
A food that, when eaten, transforms an agressive predator into a passive life form....
Wedding cake.
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A food that, when eaten, transforms an passive life form into a agressive predator ....
There, fixed that for ya.
Or were you talking about the chief bridesmaid?
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A food that, when eaten, transforms an agressive predator into a passive life form....
Wedding cake.
Passive-aggressive life form you mean.
I don't think it's especially weird. (Score:3, Insightful)
why is this different than most corals? (Score:2)
A large number of your average corals on the reef do this daily. They both capture plankton and use symbiosis with photosynthetic algae in their bodies.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Common ancestry may be independent of similar traits, is his point.
The problem, a common one, is that when a finding is reported, notions commonly understood among practitioners are omitted for brevity, and it can mislead when crossing over to non-practitioners of the fields and others less literate in science. Even worse is sometimes even the practitioners forget the proviso of the implicit notions.
Repeated mention of "correlation is not causation" may be annoying, but do serve a useful purpose, I th
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I should have written:
"Common ancestry may be independent of [a particular] similar trait, is his point."
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And, in fact, you are related because you share a common ancestor, even if it is many generations removed.
Do you know that?
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How do you know he's human? All I see is text on my screen.
I see no evidence that any intelligence other than human can compose original, coherent posts to an online forum. So with over 95 percent confidence, posts at or above Score:1 are written by humans.
Re:Interesting find... (Score:5, Insightful)
I see no evidence that any intelligence other than human can compose original, coherent posts to an online forum. So with over 95 percent confidence, posts at or above Score:1 are written by humans.
I see no evidence that any intelligence...posts to an online forum.
Fixed that for you !
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I'm willing to open my mind. Does your team have a site on the humans' World Wide Web?
Actually, some of us do. I have a personal web site that includes a FAQ that describes my job as a sort of "field worker", an anthropologist visiting Earth to collect information about human society. I occasionally get nice messages from others who turn out to be human, saying that they're doing something similar. I also get occasional email from human nut cases with the usual incoherent rambling. That's interesting, t
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Interesting find... (Score:5, Funny)
That sounds good, can you make some toast for me please? Someone else here is bound to be a butter knife, so maybe we can get a team effort going?
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In that case we would't at least have to ask "Does he run NetBSD?"...
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Oh my God! You're right! I don't anything for sure.
JESUS CHRIST! What if I'm really a toaster?
I mean, I have a lot of the same qualities as a human being, but that doesn't prove anything. What if I'm supposed to be making toast right now?!?!?
The toasters were created by man...they rebelled, they evolved, they look...Human!
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There are twelve Cylon models. If you don't look like any of them, then you're not a frakin' toaster.
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It proves that you suck at being a toaster.
Re:Interesting find... (Score:5, Insightful)
You say this as though "hypothesis" were some kind of weasel word, as though they actually do consider it a fact but are just calling it something else to avoid criticism.
Did it ever occur to you that this is precisely what a hypothesis is, and that the correlation =/= causation thing is the very reason that it is considered a hypothesis? I'm sure that these biologists have some vague idea what they're doing. If they thought that they had hard and fast proof they'd be moving this on to the "theory" stage. The very fact that they call it a hypothesis means that they agree with you.
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Every time someone posts a stupid correlation versus causation argument on Slashdot, I want to smack them.
I call this the violence-inducing-argument hypothesis, because suggesting causation would just encourage them.
Re:Interesting find... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time someone posts a stupid correlation versus causation argument on Slashdot, I want to smack them.
I call this the violence-inducing-argument hypothesis, because suggesting causation would just encourage them.
Sing it, brother!
It's a kind of pseudo-intellectual argument which is, unfortunately, very appealing to geeks. Stupid, ignorant people are prone to assuming that correlation always implies causation (even if they don't know to put it in those words) and drawing conclusions that reasonably intelligent, slightly less ignorant people can clearly see are false. So at some point they read a Philosophy 101 list of logical fallacies on the web, come across "correlation does not imply causation," and think, "Ah hah! That explains what all those stupid people are doing!" At which point it becomes the proverbial hammer for which every problem is a nail.
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In case it isn't clear: correlation, when calculated to account for confounding factors and observed enough to establish significance, is the only way we have to establish causation in the natural world. It is exactly how every accepted scientific "fact" (i.e., theory, which is as close to fact as science can ever get) was established. Everything you think you know about the way the world works is based on a correlation so significant that nobody seriously expects it to turn out the be an artifact. And that's all we've got.
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Always assuming that correlation means causation is stupid.
Always assuming it doesn't and hence we should never try and determine cause and effect and just call everything random is even stupider.
When one hates haters (Score:2)
That's amusing, considering that your argument is a correlation vs. causation argument in itself.
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In case it isn't clear: correlation, when calculated to account for confounding factors and observed enough to establish significance, is the only way we have to establish causation in the natural world. It is exactly how every accepted scientific "fact" (i.e., theory, which is as close to fact as science can ever get) was established.
Just because correlation has a high correlation with causation does not mean that correlation is causation. Have you considered that some factor other than correlation may be contributing to the causation?
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Have you considered that some factor other than correlation may be contributing to the causation?
The section of my post that you quote contains the answer to your question. That's what a confounding factor is.
To take a very simple example: if you examine two populations, one consisting of old smokers who frequently die of heart attacks and another consisting of young non-smokers who rarely die of heart attacks, and conclude that smoking increases the risk of death by heart attack, then you're clearly draw
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I agree with you completely. I just wanted to pick on you a little for essentially using correlation to argue that correlation is causation, although it'd be more amusing (and ironic) if you'd been going for the opposite.
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This is similar to the statement that says correlation does not equal causation. Just because I have brown hair and someone across the country also has brown hair and many other similarities doesn't mean both of us are related. At least they called it a "hypothesis" instead of forcing us to accept it as verified fact.
0) The claim of relatedness is based on a rigorous mathematical theory based on the theory of common descent, graph theory and Levenshtein distance. No competent mathematician in the world objects to these methods.
1) Slashbots are fucking retarded on the subject of statistics, and cannot wrap their puny minds around the concept of Bayesian inference. You better believe correlation God damn CAN show causation in some cases.
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Correlation is not equal to causation; it is only a requirement for it
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They'll sue the scientists for discovering something that infringes.
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I'd wager that nature has the prior art rights on that one. Another reason why I think patents for genoms are a wee bit silly.
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And if you really got worked up, a TIME CUBE reference wouldn't've been too hard, you educated stupid one-dimensional DULLARD.
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And if you really got worked up, a TIME CUBE reference wouldn't've been too hard, you educated stupid one-dimensional DULLARD.
Not TIME CUBE , Time Tunnel S01E28 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0723775/ [imdb.com] Dont worry we'll win, just wait till sunset
Alternatively we might have to watch out for Carrots http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0636227/ [imdb.com]