Comment on Not impressed
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 6 days agoYou could see the short circuit in his head when I told my cousin’s husband about how slime mold has something like 13 different sexes, and that birds don’t use x/y but rather z/w.
Digestive_Biscuit@feddit.uk 6 days ago
I listened to a podcast recently about potatoes. The ones in Europe are all one species. They can’t grow variants from seeds because they have 4 chromosomes which means growing from seeds doesn’t give the same variant. They are basically clones. If a variant is lost it cannot be brought back, it’s gone for good.
I never knew how interesting potatoes are!
Brgor@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
Lots of crops are like this, like apples! It’s called extreme heterozygosity.
Alenalda@lemmy.world 6 days ago
One of the coolest thing about apples imo. All those varieties you love like granny Smith are literally just the same tree grafted over and over again.
Digestive_Biscuit@feddit.uk 6 days ago
That’s the big word I couldn’t remember. I didn’t know apples were the same but that really makes sense now.