The best way to never go extinct is to be usable by humans
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
1106 points (98.9% liked)
Memes
45517 readers
1177 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Best way to go extinct is much the same.
Shrödinger's extinction
Underrated comment
I actually thought about that and changed "enjoyed" to "usable"
Dodos were tasty and Vaquitas are cute but chickens, wheat, potatoes, rice etc. are a borderline infinite food glitch for humans compared to most food sources so they naturally get cultivated in huge numbers
Mmmmm, tasty Dodo bird.
For every dodo there's a cow and for every chicken there's a giant tortoise 🤷
Hemp / marijuana is arguably the most successful plant at this. It enjoys a high degree of biodiversity where as most plants we cultivate suffer from monoculture problems. Why is hemp / marijuana so successful? Probably because of its multiple uses. It makes strong fibers, you can make milk from it, you can make all sorts of consumer products like lip balm and hair conditioner, and you can get fucking ripped bro
See also Brassica Oleracea aka wild cabbage which we've cultivated into cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, collard greens, savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, gai lan.. etc
we've even cultivated it into magical artefacts, romanesco broccoli
I love the texture of cooked romanesco, it's as if potatoes and broccoli got together and decided to have a fractal baby
Fun fact, apparently nature can only do fractals 4 levels deep. This works for romanesco, fern, and tons of others. I am yet to find an outlier.
Both by using it as a protien supplement and a psychoactive chemical.
It depends, silphium was potentially an effective contraceptive that was harvested to extinction.
The difference in survival probably stems from a single hyphen.
Mint grows like a fucking weed. Silphium grew like a fucking-weed.
You aren’t kidding. I got four tiny spearmint plants this spring. They are growing kind of hydroponically because I have a pond.
In less than three months, those plants have exploded into huge nice-smelling bushes that are more than two feet in each dimension. They are planted in a line so there’s this walk of mint that’s almost 12 feet long.
But that’s not enough. The plants send out branches along the ground like freaking tentacles. They will spill out of a planter box, for instance.
The fast growth is why I chose this plant, but damn!
You're going to battling mint for decades to come.
My mom made that same mistake more than 20 years ago. The original plants are long gone but I am still dealing with mint in my garden and just everywhere. It takes over the lawn.
The smell when you run the lawnmower, though... Heaven
Similar is happening to Western Yews for cancer meds, I think. Whether it survives depends on how easy it is to tame if only intensive agriculture will supply the demand. And then there's the question of whether it's still the same thing -- looking at you, broiler chicken.
Task failed successfully
Humans aren't the only ones to do this. Many animals eat plants that don't kill them but are deadly to their predators / parasites.
The poison dart frog is like this!
When in captivity, they actually aren't poisonous because their diet is different.
What's truly amazing is how the frogs learned to make and use darts.
Life, uh … finds a way.
Stoneage frogs are just Grung, that's how
Lol what is this article?
First
Poison dart frogs are not poisonous in captivity because they do not have access to the specific insects that they would eat in the wild which contain the toxins that make them poisonous.
Also
It is a common misconception that dart frogs lose their poison in captivity. In reality, they only lose their toxicity when they are exposed to certain chemicals found in captivity, such as cleaners and pesticides
Later
They acquire these toxins as they eat certain insects in their environment that contain them. So if a poison dart frog is ever relocated to an area where these insects don’t exist, it will lose its toxicity over time.
Finally...... it's fine if you're not worries about getting poisoned
Some people handle their poison dart frogs with gloves, but this isn’t necessary unless you have an open wound on your hand or you’re particularly worried about getting poisoned.
I'm seeing alot of these extremely low effort articles recently that are, for some reason, ranked very highly by google. AI spam probably?
It's almost certainly machine generated text. And I'm terrified of a future where I need to first sort out 10 poorly written AI articles until I find something that's actually written by a human and coherent.
That's ... now. That's literally already the case. I rarely find good a good result on the first page anymore.
The Internet is so fucking trash now. Video game solutions and mobile issue resolutions are two things I can personally confirm are no longer found in the first page of Google results.
Poison dart frogs aren't actuallu poisonous, unless they are, in which case, they are poisonous
Yeah I thought I was having a stroke reading that article. Looks almost AI generated.
Almost? I've seen two other articles this week that were self-contradictory mere sentences apart. I'm pretty sure this is an AI plague.
Yeah I'm going to be honest. When I went to link an article, I just did a Google search and looked for the first article that wasn't completely trashed with ads. Just briefly skimmed the article, not enough to tear it apart obviously.
Hot peppers: haha poor mint wait what the fuck
"Why would you eat me when I make you shit fire??"
Humans: Haha painfully burning mouth go brrrrr
We failed evolutionarily to adapt an immunity to capsaicin. But peppers are super good for us, they are packed with vitamins. So instead we evolved a dopamine response to it that makes them more tolerable and slightly pleasing. This is why when eating something spicy, the heat gets worse after you stop eating, because you stop getting the little dopamine hits that dull the pain. It's also why people love spicy food, you actually get a little high, similar to a runners high.
Not a chance. Peppers and the vast majority of humans still in existence did not interact for most of human evolution. Peppers are a new world plant and the humans who had the most experience and could have evolved along side them lost 90% of their genetic diversity when the Colombian exchange brought them a massive multi-disease plague. The return where peppers came to the rest of the world was in the 16th century. Not really enough time for evolution to guide people towards eating the plant. It’s a very short time on a genetic scale.
That theory may not hold for pepper alone, but capsaicin is found in spicy foods in general and may have health benefits, such as anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties so consuming spicy foods may have provided an advantage in promoting overall health
Haha one of the best uses of those wojaks I've seen
Mouth cool!
My bunnies love mint tho