Mitonuclear match.

[Cramulus]

"dog vomit slime mold" 

[Kai]

"dog vomit slime mold" 

It looks like dog vomit, but apparently it's edible. Tastes earthy, like fungi, almost. Or so I've heard. I've seen some really neat time-lapse photography of individual slimes flowing.

[Kai]

Dear Kai:

You are very kind not to end your last post with a "pwned" macro. However, you probably should have.

Why? 

[LMNO]

Well, I made some asshatted comment about ID, and you quite neatly and succinctly kicked it in the balls, thereby laying down what could be referred to as "pwnage".

In other words, "awesome post in response to a stupid joke".

[Cramulus]

this is off-topic, but it's a question for Kai

I watched a documentary which mentioned a particular kind of deep sea creature, and I'm trying to remember what it was called.

They are very very small, and look like little trees. They absorb particles from the surrounding water, and use those particles to build the twigs at the end of the "branches". Essentially they build themselves from their surroundings. They are somehow able to decide which particles to include and which to reject.

The narrator of this documentary mentioned that we have few definitions of intelligence which can't be applied to these simple creatures.


any idea what it was?

[Cramulus]

Ah - found it! It was "tree foraminifera". Werner Herzog talks about them in his documentary "Encounters at the End of the World"



found a website with the transcript:

All that the divers had brought back from the ocean floor were a few spoonfuls of sand containing the strange single-celled creatures the scientists are studying here.
 
They are known as tree foraminifera, primordial single-celled organisms. They branch out in the shape of trees. The branches give off pseudopodia, microscopic false feet that gather and assemble grains of sand
into a protective shell around the twigs.
 
These are the pseudopodia that are secreted by foraminifera. They're long, thin, tendril-like projections.

What the foram does is it wakes up, sends out the pseudopods and then just grabs every particle in its environment and pulls them in toward its body. There's a certain pattern to the way that they sort the particles.
 
They can select particular grains out of everything in the environment and just end up with them.
They're beautiful masons. Could that be a very early appearance of intelligence?

- I say it with great care.
- Yeah, I have to say it with great care, too, because there are stories about how these particular organisms have fit into that debate.

Turn of the last century, for example, there was a scientist, a British scientist named Heron-Allen who, apparently, during one of the debates in one of the British societies was pointing out the fact that every definition of intelligence that was being formulated could be fulfilled by these single-celled creatures.

Borderline intelligence, yeah, at the single-celled level. I mean, it is a manifestation of the best of our abilities, really, the way that they build their shells. It's almost art.

 

[The Good Reverend Roger]

That is a twig.  You are being put on.

[Cramulus]

LIVING FUCKING TWIGS!!

[The Good Reverend Roger]

LIVING FUCKING TWIGS!!

KEEP FUCKING THAT CHICKEN TWIG!

[Triple Zero]

Diffusion-limited aggregates look like trees. That's just what happens, for the same reason that a planet looks like a sphere. Not much intelligence involved.

If you tweak the parameters of when/where/what particles attach to the aggregate, it's very possible to get a more sparse tree-looking shape like in your picture, instead of the usual more dense feathery/moss like structure.

It's fucking awesome, though.

Additionally, DLAs are cool to simulate on a computar because they look pretty.

[Kai]

this is off-topic, but it's a question for Kai

I watched a documentary which mentioned a particular kind of deep sea creature, and I'm trying to remember what it was called.

They are very very small, and look like little trees. They absorb particles from the surrounding water, and use those particles to build the twigs at the end of the "branches". Essentially they build themselves from their surroundings. They are somehow able to decide which particles to include and which to reject.

The narrator of this documentary mentioned that we have few definitions of intelligence which can't be applied to these simple creatures.


any idea what it was?

I'm going to respond to this and your other post together, Cram (to take up less room); this is fucking AWESOME. I knew that Foraminifera were fucking awesome, but I had never heard of this type before.

As for intelligence, I think all living things have it. By Antero Alli's definition, even bacteria and archaea can absorb, integrate and communicate information, or they wouldn't have survived. Proteins on the surface of the cells 'absorb' information from the surrounding environment; proteins and nucleic acids within the cell 'integrate' the information with the rest of the cell systems; and the result is information is 'communicated' back out into the environment via movement or whatever reaction the cell takes. The extent of intelligence is a measure of how much and how well the organism absorbs, integrates and communicates information about its environment.

But back to the foraminiferans. The 'roots' and 'twigs' are hollow tubes through which the fillamentous pseudopods move. All Rhizarians have these, kinda like an amoeba but the cytoplasmic flow is all stretched out and tentacle-like. The foramenifera in particular make shells kinda like diatoms, except out of calcium carbonate instead of silica, and they're pocked with pores where the pseudopods stick through. The tree foraminiferans remind me of caddisflies a bit. They use the sand tubes to protect so they can reach farther into the environment. And like caddisflies, they probably have some sensory mechanism for size ordering the particles. (ETA: or it's just fractal physics operating, as Zero said, which is just as cool)

I think there's a tendency to look at very small eukaryotes and compare them to bacteria, or little animals, but these are not bacteria, and they are certainly not animals, or plants, or any thing familiar to our ordinary experience. Rhizaria are their own kind of life, so alien to us; we're more closely related to fungi than to forams. They're only covered under the international code of /zoological/ nomenclature because we don't have a code for Rhizarian nomenclature, and we didn't even know how different they were when we first learned of them.

I mean, think of it this way. Think of all the different kinds of animals (metazoans); everything from sponges to insects and nematodes, to vertebrates. Now consider: Foramenifera is a division of life even OLDER than Metazoa, far more diverse in the past than now. It's a whole other kingdom. Whatever guidelines we're using as remarkable based on our metazoan experience just doesn't cut it.

[Cramulus]

that is really cool

man, imagine if they became the dominant form of life in this joint

[Kai]

that is really cool

man, imagine if they became the dominant form of life in this joint

They were, at one point. Given the acidification of the oceans I'm thinking it's not likely. CaCO3 and acid do not mix well. There are about 275 thousand described species of forams, and only 4000 of those are alive today. The rest are known from their fossilized shells. Apparently it's a good profession for a paleontologist to hang out with oil rigs, because the foram species from a sample can tell what geological period the core is taken from.

[Telarus]

As we're discussing crazy/cool behavior at the (near)microscopic level, check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br-YxeXWx6s

Professor Arthur J. Olson of the Scripps Research Institute demonstrates a 3D printed model of a virus that self assembles when shaken. Olson is head of the Molecular Graphics Laboratory, which uses 3D computer models, 3D printing, and augmented reality to create tools for life science researchers and educators.

[Cramulus]

between this and the solar system video, you are blowing my mind this morning, big T