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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."
Plant or animal! Prepare the soft padded cells.
Definitely an interesting result. The original article is published in Science. A free abstract can be found here.
This is your creator deity... And this is your creator deity on drugs.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
Sound like my wife
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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At least they called it a "hypothesis" instead of forcing us to accept it as verified fact.
You say this as though "hypothesis" were some kind of weasel word, as though they actually do consider it a fact but are just calling it something else to avoid criticism.
Did it ever occur to you that this is precisely what a hypothesis is, and that the correlation =/= causation thing is the very reason that it is considered a hypothesis? I'm sure that these biologists have some vague idea what they're doing. If they thought that they had hard and fast proof they'd be moving this on to the "theory" stage. The very fact that they call it a hypothesis means that they agree with you.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
While this is extremely interesting, we need a link to the actual journal article, or to some source material, not just a link to a blog. Without that we can only assume this is an attempt to turf slashdot to drive traffic to your blog and generate ad revenues.
I for one welcome our new single celled predatory overlords, but deride their single celled hippy photosynthesizing cousins.
Biology is full of promoter-inhibitor relationships, and this seems like an interesting one. When the algae is inside the protist, the host's "animal" behaviors and anatomy are suppressed, but they clearly remain in a latent state, ready to reactivate after fission. It makes one wonder to what extent chloroplasts remain as endosymbionts versus organelles in genuine plant species. So . . .
. . .
Does anyone know of any research where chloroplasts were removed from plant cells in culture, to see if the remaining cells revert to some atavistic animal-like exogenous-food-seeking state?
For all those interested, Scientific American has the story.
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I see no evidence that any intelligence other than human can compose original, coherent posts to an online forum. So with over 95 percent confidence, posts at or above Score:1 are written by humans.
I see no evidence that any intelligence...posts to an online forum.
Fixed that for you !
Smivs on the intertubes!
That sounds good, can you make some toast for me please? Someone else here is bound to be a butter knife, so maybe we can get a team effort going?
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
But when I read the article summary, one of the first questions on my mind was... How does it interact with Japanese schoolgirls?
Every time someone posts a stupid correlation versus causation argument on Slashdot, I want to smack them.
I call this the violence-inducing-argument hypothesis, because suggesting causation would just encourage them.
Sing it, brother!
It's a kind of pseudo-intellectual argument which is, unfortunately, very appealing to geeks. Stupid, ignorant people are prone to assuming that correlation always implies causation (even if they don't know to put it in those words) and drawing conclusions that reasonably intelligent, slightly less ignorant people can clearly see are false. So at some point they read a Philosophy 101 list of logical fallacies on the web, come across "correlation does not imply causation," and think, "Ah hah! That explains what all those stupid people are doing!" At which point it becomes the proverbial hammer for which every problem is a nail.
...
In case it isn't clear: correlation, when calculated to account for confounding factors and observed enough to establish significance, is the only way we have to establish causation in the natural world. It is exactly how every accepted scientific "fact" (i.e., theory, which is as close to fact as science can ever get) was established. Everything you think you know about the way the world works is based on a correlation so significant that nobody seriously expects it to turn out the be an artifact. And that's all we've got.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"Hatena" doesn't really mean "enigma". It's actually an interjection, and a more accurate translation would be something like "Weird!" or "Oh man!".
A food that, when eaten, transforms an agressive predator into a passive life form....
Wedding cake.
Have gnu, will travel.