We don’t need chickens to survive either. It doesn’t mean we didn’t domesticate them.
Comment on arborholing
deranger@sh.itjust.works 1 month agoIt’s because it doesn’t really make sense, plants came before animals. Plants do not need us to survive, but we need plants to survive.
jrs100000@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Manjushri@piefed.social 1 month ago
Plants need us animals to turn that oxygen they produce back into carbon dioxide for them.
deranger@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Nope, fungi and other decomposers do that.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’m decomposing with the best of them, my friend.
Morphit@feddit.uk 5 weeks ago
You’re more of a decomposee than a decomposer.
MalReynolds@piefed.social 1 month ago
Eh, oxygen builds up, fire, CO2…
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 month ago
Which MOST plants seem to want to avoid… (although for others it has become a necessity, depends on what you are used to I guess)
codemankey@programming.dev 1 month ago
Things change tho, they can “evolve” so to say.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 month ago
plants came from red algae i believe, that was able to survive on land as primitive bryphytes, or thier ancestors. carbiniferous period is when they really took off. Plants encorporated both chloroplast and mitochondria endosymbionts in thier evolution.
Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Plants came before moths, but there are some desert plants whose life cycle is dependent on a species of moth pollinating them. How things were in the past influences but isn’t the sole arbiter of how things are in the present or future.
deranger@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Some being a key word there. Plants, as a whole, are not dependent on mammals for their existence.
Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Yeah, I don’t think the OP was saying every plant in existence is dependent on humans. But crops are, and we’re dependent on them. Co-domestication, I guess.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 month ago
most of them, but they all can naturalized and go feral and become weeds. plants that are triploid which is artificially induced by people are totally dependant on humans for survival, aka watermelon, cavendish banannas ,etc. crops become feral overtime.
the advatange of plants becoming feral, is that most of them have high ploidy numbers for chromosones, rather than the usual 2 copies. some can have 1-20+ copies of thier chromosome., even crops, this allows plants to have copies of genes that can be somewhat detremental, but not affect the plants fitness, because they multiple copies of the same normal gene, those same copies can also evolve to give selective advantage. thats why some weeds or invasive plants are very hard to eradicate. reproduce extremely fast, asexually or otherwise or poisonous which makes them highly resistant to pests.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 month ago
plants like magnolia used beetles for pollination, magnoliads being a very ancient lingeage of plants. its only very later before bees, moths, and then butterflies became the dominant pollinators, and then mammals.