Symbiosis - Tumblr Posts

Glaucous-winged Gulls are notable for their peculiar symbiotic relationship with any of several species of sea star. Rather than simply devour the star, these gulls will store them in an organ called a ‘crop' where it will feed on small amounts of undigested food in return for occasional use as a sort of ‘mouth hand’. This gives the host gull a stronger grip on heavier food items, allowing it to take things as unwieldy as a foot-long hotdog or a large container of french fries.

Unlike more traditional woodpeckers who root around for interesting larvae and boring insects, Acorn Woodpeckers have a symbiotic relationship with Granary Trees (an ancient offshoot of mighty Oaks). Without the help of these chisel-beaked avians, Granary Trees would strangle as their own acorns germinate inside them. After removing the acorns, these unusual woodpeckers will proceed to bury them in underground caches as emergency food in case of a harsh winter; come spring any caches that were not consumed sprout new Granary Trees, beginning the cycle anew.

GRES HOUSE, BRASIL

Currently under construction in Itauna, Brazil, the Gres House project by Luciano Kruk helps us refocus on a major existential debate in architecture: is a building supposed to adapt to its surrounding environment or adapt the environment to its convenience? 

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Okay am I stupid or are there actually no papers on this?

I'm writing an essay for a neuroendocrinology course and decided my topic to be olfactory detection of predators.

Basically my thinking was "what if prey animals... Just... Smell their enemies coming??? Wouldn't that be extremely advantageous???" And it turns out that there's been a number of studies on rats and mice that prove: Yes, they can smell predators and those odours actually induce a quick fear response in the rats/mice!

Weird? No, not really. Detecting predators from afar is very useful. It's why prey animals often have eyes on both sides of their head: to scan the horizon for predators in almost all directions.

Point is that predator and prey are locked in a co-evolutionary arms race: if prey adapts to predator, predator in turn has to adapt as well. Your prey can detect you from a yards away? Just slap on some camouflage. Your preys ears are like satellite dishes? Just develop specialised feathers that make glide silently through the air. Or, what some predators decided to do, ignore all the beautiful innovations from your prey and just... team up with yo frens and circle your meal...

But if your prey has a keen sense of smell??? What can you do? You could mask your scent some way or another (olfactory camouflage) or leave fewer scent marks on your territory... I guess...

But I've never heard of such a strategy. Nor can I find papers on the matter...

Rats and mice rely on their sense of smell almost more than anything... And they can smell odours from foxes clearly. So then why do foxes still secrete those odours??

TLDR; rat smell fox, fox do not use deodorant, why??

EDIT: ppl keep reblogging this but it's worth it to look in the notes because people have been providing answers to this

Footnote: Feel like seeing more rambles n' stuff? This is my current blog! Due to some technical issues with the old one, I will be rblging the original MMM and CFF posts on this account, as well as future write-ups!

Creacher Feature Friday 6: I Found a Tragedy and a Rarity in the Ferns 🪺

~Ah, brood parasitism, one of my favorite forms of symbiosis. Brilliant tactic, evolutionarily speaking. Why invest precious resources and time into raising your own offspring, when you can just entirely hijack the parental instincts of another species? The cuckoo bird is one of the most well known and famous examples of this reproductive strategy, never building their own nests, but happy to drop their eggs into the clutches of other birds to raise as their own.

*(fun fact: this is actually the origin of the slang words “cuckold” and “cuck”, from an old French term for the cuckoo bird.)

Today I would, however, love to talk to talk about the brown-headed cowbird, another parasitic avian species, common to the United States.

The reason why is because I found a lucky, incredible sight while watering my Aunt’s ferns once:

If you don’t immediately get why I was so excited when I realized what this was, this is a photo I took of an inactive house finch nest I had been keeping my eyes on last summer.

For some reason every year, they love to set up nests inside the hanging plants. A cowbird must have also decided it seemed like a lovely spot, and left behind one of its own eggs in the nest. Now I didn’t see the brood up close myself until the family had already moved on, and I snapped this picture when the time came to remove the nest, having no idea it had even been parasitized. And what was left behind is evidence of a little-known phenomenon called

Egg capping!

What makes parasitism like the This destructive to the original nest is that one cowbird hatchling usually dooms its adoptive siblings. They grow much faster than their host species and they immediately outcompete the other fledgelings in the nest due to their size for the host parents’ attention and feeding. I think you can see why they need all they can get. Exhibit A:

Another way they have of reducing competition in the nest, it’s been theorized, is to literally prevent their “clutchmates” from hatching at all- by “capping” one of the original eggs with its own eggshell. This is not something that the hatchling does on purpose, but with a little bit of luck, in the fact that they often hatch and develop faster than the hosts, this can happen by pure chance as the shell gets tossled around with the other eggs. And evidently, this is extremely rare to happen under normal circumstances, what with chicks synchronizing their hatching, the parents usually then removing the shells from the nest.

So, it’s a fortunate evolutionary bonus for these home-wrecker cowbirds that this is another way they manage to gum up the works.

An Extra note: though it is potentially upsetting news that Brown-headed cowbirds are detrimental to their host nests, they are still a native and federally protected species in their home range. It is illegal to remove or tamper with their eggs the same way it is illegal to disturb their hosts’, and upon finding a parasitized nest in your yard, remember that it is best to let nature take its course. Cowbirds are still part of this beautiful ecosystem, even if they are mooching free-loaders :)

But, there is a nasty little twist to the story in my nest photos. The cowbird chick probably didn’t find success either. You see… house finches were actually a really poor choice for the mother cowbird who decided to drop her offspring here.

While the majority of local songbirds here (brown headed cowbirds included) require insects in their diet to develop well and strong, house finches are a special exception- they are almost exclusively herbivores. The cowbird that capped this finch egg probably didn’t fare well under its unsuspecting parents, muscling out its competition in vein. I hope those finches have a better run next year, but I am very thankful I got to see some really neat ecology in action, and right outside the front door!

Beautiful nature of the ecosystem.

🥭esign

Symbiosis isn't just mutualism. Parasitism is symbiosis. It's uncomfortable to confront parasitic relationships if you want to see your human ideas of good and bad reflected in Nature.

But gazing into something huge and utterly Other, being uncomfortable means you're engaging your mind with it. "Uncomfortable" is actually a whole spectrum of emotions that become a vivid and satisfying rainbow.

There was a post a while back with some artwork of Dendrogaster, a crustacean that parasitizes starfish, and its body is like this branching fractal of fleshy lobes made to fit inside the body of the starfish mirroring its structure, and I was absolutely horrified to look at this, and this horror was the same emotion as a strangely visceral wave of sympathy for this parasite.

Creative works about parasites often invoke the horror of bodily invasion, which is visceral and strong for me, but this artwork inverted that horror, instead showing the horror of being made so perfectly for fitting within someone else that you lose everything you are and become unrecognizable.

I also think of the post about the cowbird chick. It's awful that the bird pushes its siblings out of the nest as it grows, and the mama feeds it because she instinctively must feed her chick, but the cowbird is just a baby. Was it wrong for him to hatch, to be alive, to be hungry, to be a baby and to need love?

Symbiosis is intensely beautiful, and sometimes it's beautiful because it's grotesque and terrible. Of course, the symbiosis between two organisms isn't an allegory for a relationship, it just is a relationship, but looking at the way organisms become entwined feels like you're seeing things that, if words described them, would also be human experiences.

Being invaded by a parasite is a horror of powerlessness and loss of autonomy, but being a parasite is also defined by powerlessness. In many cases, the parasite will die without the host, but the host can live without the parasite. I wonder why it is expected to sympathize with one and not the other.

Your immune system fights against internal parasites like a tapeworm...Imagine being a tapeworm. The body of your host is your universe. Do you find your world to be kind? Benevolent? Does your god love you?

Sometimes people call disabled people "parasites." When I think about my future sometimes I'm uncertain and afraid.

But when a rare non-photosynthetic orchid blooms in the forest, this is not the forest's weakness and failure, but its crowning glory.

I think about the fact that I had 18 hours in iwatex in the first two days of owning it a lot. To say I like this game feels like an understatement.

WIP of me with my protagonist!

Brick and me!

Roy and Diana, main characters of Symbiosis seasons!

What's the history between these two, I wonder...

Ariana Castillo, the bakers' daughter!

Have you ever walked through an evergreen forest to clear your mind? Eaten a nice warm vegetable stew? Received flowers from someone you love? Well... thank our hidden hero:

Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi!

Hidden beneath your feet, nestled away inside the roots of 80-90% of vascular plants, there is a complex network of hyphae working in tandem with their plant buddies to keep our ecosystems alive and thriving!

Essentially, these microscopic fungi give plants Super Tolerance. Hyphae are much smaller than roots, which means that they can reach out farther while expending less energy and worm their way into places that are normally inaccessible to plants. This allows vascular plants to access more mineral nutrients than they normally could on their own. These fun-guys are so effective that some plants can even live their lives completely achlorophyllic (without chlorophyll)!

In return, plants will partition some of the carbon and simple sugars produced from photosynthesis to give to their buddies. This is done through vesicles formed by hyphae in the plant cells.

This isn't anything new either! In fact, you might even thank AMF for plants migrating onto land at all. A popular hypothesis for the colonization of land by plants is that the first vascular plants formed from an ancient partnership between algae and fungi, where essentially the fungi would act as the algae's roots to collect nutrients not available to the algae alone outside the water. If you'd like to see a cool example, look up the Rhynie chert!!

Thank you for letting me ramble a while at you about my favorite organisms on this planet :•) I encourage all of you to do some more research on your own, there is a TON that I haven't covered here! If you have access to a microscope, you can even dissect and stain some common garden roots to say hello to these little buddies yourself!

[This piece is directly inspired by the work of @/byjacobparis on Instagram! Please go give him a follow :•) ]

im reading a lot of research about the mycorrhizal network because this is a HUGE emerging area of research and there is so much new stuff coming out its sooooo neat

So basically "the mycorrhizal network is how trees send each other nutrients and help each other" is wrong,

but the main reason people were mad at it—because they thought everything in the ecosystem is selfish and competitive acting for its own interests—is much wronger.

How come?

Well...fungi aren't just a postal service for trees. They have lives of their own! Plants aren't just controlling the mycorrhizal network to send nutrients where they want, they are communicating with the fungus and negotiating the terms of that relationship.

The genetic basis in plants for forming the mycorrhizal symbiosis is old. REALLY old. Like, "before plants even came onto land" OLD. Other forms of symbiosis, like what legumes have going on with the Rhizobia, are using the same genes to do their thing. There's a LOT of genes involved with creating the symbiosis, including some redundancies just to be safe, and we're only just now starting to understand them.

Why so many genes? What are all these genes for? Everything! Communication chemicals, hormones the other partner will respond to, flipping switches in the other partner's genes. There was a lot of arguing over which partner, the plant or the fungus, was "controlling" the partnership, but this question turned out to be total nonsense. Both symbionts have to recognize each other, respond to each other, prepare for symbiosis by adjusting how their genes are expressed, form the symbiosis, and continuously negotiate the relationship by exchanging chemical signals. Both can actively select the partner that offers the best benefits. There's even experiments where it's been shown that if the fungus turns parasitic, the plant will start secreting fungicidal chemicals. (But also the mutualist fungi in the experiment outcompeted the parasitic one when the pots were seeded with both.)

Mycorrhizal symbiosis is an incredibly intimate relationship. Like, the fungus produces special organs that literally grow inside the plant's cells, and the plant is actively participating in allowing this to happen. The plants and fungi have genes for hormones used by the other species, they have soooooo much stuff encoded in their DNA for interacting with their symbionts, it's like, blurring the lines for whether they're even separate organisms. There are SO many chemicals involved in communication between them and we only understand a few of those chemicals.

This is SO MUCH COOLER than if the plants were just using the fungus as a passive conduit to communicate with and support each other. The fungus is actively participating!

We were fools and assumed there had to be one partner that was "in control," but both plant AND fungus have to initiate and to some extent they're each engaging on their own terms! Or maybe it's better to think of them as one and the same organism?

We're also finding out that there's a lot more types of mycorrhizal symbiosis than we thought (at least five) and a lot more variety in how it works.

And that's not even getting into fungal endosymbionts—fungi that live inside plant cells completely instead of having part of them be outside and in the soil. They aren't considered mycorrhizae because they're fully inside the plant cells and not connected with any soil fungi network but they do a lot of complicated things we don't understand and interact with the plant's other symbionts.

Fungal endosymbionts produce a lot of chemicals that are useful to the plants in some way, and it turns out, that a lot of them kill cancer. Seriously, we've gotten a LOT of anti-cancer drugs from these guys. I think it's because they have to bypass the plant's immune system, but they also fight each other/other little guys that get inside plant cells, so they kind of...are part of the plant's immune system?

And what's MORE

Is that plants and fungus aren't the only things part of this system! There's also bacteria that are symbiotic with the plants and fungi! Even the endosymbiont fungi have bacteria that are endosymbionts inside THEM. Double endosymbiosis.

I think I read one paper saying the bacteria use the fungi to get around? Like that's how Rhizobia find their way to the legume roots in the first place? Have to double check that one

https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/pilobolus_perform_symbiosis.html

I’ve found myself watching a lot of dance in my study breaks. I think it puts you in a really relaxed yet contemplative mood. This is quite an old video, but it takes my breath away every time I watch it.