It took a long time for nature to figure out how to process wood, but it eventually happened. My wooden furniture is still standing though.
Comment on PLASTICMAXXING
Caitlyynn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
I’m still waiting for nature to figure out how to process plastics and bring down most of the world’s infrastructure with it. But I’m not qualified to actually know if this is even possible
Tinidril@midwest.social 4 days ago
GTG3000@programming.dev 4 days ago
There’s fungi that are eating the pacific trash patch, but the issue is that there’s not much energy to be gained from plastics we use. It’s slow.
Plesiohedron@lemmy.cafe 4 days ago
Maybe teach that fungus how to photosynthesize.
Or cell scale fusion.
MTK@lemmy.world 4 days ago
If I remember correctly it is a real concern and also part of why developing a bacteria that can break down plastic is very dangerous (not just because it could degrade our tools and infrastructure, but also because it will release literally megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere)
Fyi, in the past there was nothing in nature to break down trees (lignin) and it actually was a problem as they would literally pile up and essentially be the same problem we have today with plastic (ironically it caused global cooling) thorogood.co.uk/treevolution-how-trees-came-first…
HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I thought it already had, I swear I rember some scientists finding or creating something, bacteria fungus or something that processes some polymers and they where tryna get ot to out and eat plastic ig so they can put it in landfills everywhere.
janus2@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
I’m vaguely qualified (biochem degree) to say it’s probably possible
that being said there’s just a lot of stuff in nature easier to eat than plastic so if some kind of plasticphagic microbe starts causing issues it’ll likely be somewhere otherwise very inhospitable, like near the poles or in space, where there’s not much else in the way of metabolizable carbon sources
which, lol. imagine going on an Antarctic or space mission and your fucking PPE starts fermenting lmao good luck
or the ocean might become so horribly poisinous that everything dies and after microbes eat all the dead biomass and then each other, then they start eating the plastic 😬
Smokeydope@lemmy.world 4 days ago
The thing is that even if there isn’t much energy in plastic to be extracted, theres still enough energy in it to make a viable food source. Now, consider the humble panda and its primary food source, fucking eucalyptus leaves. Theyre so hard to chew that koalas had to spend evolutionary time and energy just to spec into it to the point they cant eat anything else pretty much. Combine that with the fact that eucalyptis leaves are so devoid of nutrients that the koala has to spend all day every day just snacking on them to not die of malnutrition.
Why? Why would a species even bother with this flim-flam if eucalypti sucks that bad as a food source? The answer is: Food scarcity. Because eucalytis grows everywhere where koalas live and because nobody else is bothering to tap into the food source, this sets up a ecological niche by pretty much gaurenteeing any animal that sucessfully finds a way to make it work will have unlimited amounts of food/energy just from the fact theres so damn much of it and nothing else wants to/can touch it. Sure koalas might have paid the price by sacrificing some brain wrinkles but who needs higher intelligence when you have leaves to snack on and sex to make babies.
A similar thing happened with trees and mushrooms. In the deep evolutionary history of our planet trees were once the apex forms of life with forest covering pretty much the whole planet. This is because nothing knew how to break down the wood making up stems for a good couple million years. Most of the coal and oil that we dig up today is actually the preserved remains of these unbroken down trees from the carboniferous period that just layed there petrified never rotting until the carbon compressed into hard rock or squeezed into liquid. The great change in the era happened when our humble mycelium bois finally figured out how to eat wood, causing them to essentially become the new apex life for a time.
Natanael@infosec.pub 4 days ago
Next issue (?) is that there’s a million types of plastic. Different compositions, different structure. Plastic eating bacteria won’t touch every variant.
twice_hatch@midwest.social 4 days ago
Michael Crichton called it in Andromeda Strain lol