21–30 of 36 posts
I’ve been trying to find a place to buy this plant (Texas, USA) for 3 years. Every place online I have found is always out of stock. Right now is actually the season to plant it, so I’ve been looking for it again. Has anyone found a place to buy it that is not out of stock and ships to the US?
I’ve been trying to find a place to buy this plant (Texas, USA) for 3 years. Every place online I have found is always out of stock. Right now is actually the season to plant it, so I’ve been looking for it again. Has anyone found a place to buy it that is not out of stock and ships to the US?
Are you experienced with growing plants this difficult? I'm big into plants and spend a lot of time reading about plants like these and it always saddens me to read about cool plants and then see that they're endangered because of wild harvesting to sell on the market. I always wonder who the hell is buying this. B. trifoliolata has not yet been evaluated for whether or not its endangered and it's unlikely it will any time soon since parasitic plants are notoriously hard to diagnose. Please don't go out searching for this unless you're absolutely sure you have the equipment and knowledge necessary to actually propagate this plant. A quick search on the Tropical Fruit Forum[1] shows that no one else has really had much success in cultivating this
[0] https://www.gbif.org/species/7306115 [1] https://tropicalfruitforum.com/
Why would the vine mimic the leaves of the host plant? Is it tasty enough for animals to seek out the specific leaves or what?
When it comes to other animals, theres a lot of principled caution about attributing supposedly "human" concepts to apes or orca whales. When it comes to computers, we tend to be exceedingly cautious. For some reason that principled caution goes out the window once we start talking about plants. Here on HN I've seen folks equate photoreceptivity to consciousness, chemical exchanges between roots to full fledged "comm…
[0] https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one...
From Wikipedia: “In a 2022 paper, it was suggested that the plant has some sort of vision using ocelli. This hypothesis was presented on the basis of experiments in which the vine appeared to mimic plastic vines and artificial plants. However, the only control used was the lower leaves on the same plants, with an opaque shelf over them which could have influenced light exposure. The lack of control plants climbing an…
The current process is wasting everyone's time.
Why would the vine mimic the leaves of the host plant? Is it tasty enough for animals to seek out the specific leaves or what?
I'm no biologist, but if I had to guess, I'd guess the opposite: it wants to look like tastier plants so that animals eat it and spread its seeds.
But actually the hypotheses I've seen align more with the original poster's ideas. Plants don't want their leaves eaten. That's why they produce so many secondary chemicals to make leaves taste bitter or hard to digest. Most plants don't even want their fruit eaten actually. A plant has to spend a lot of "evolution points" (to borrow a phrase from TierZoo) to adapt to being able to survive the digestive process of whichever seed disperser it wants to attract.
Why would the vine mimic the leaves of the host plant? Is it tasty enough for animals to seek out the specific leaves or what?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The caution about attributing "human concepts" to other animals, like emotions, empathy, language and self-awareness, comes from the religious idea that humans are "above" all the other creatures. If God created humans as some special case, then it makes sense. Not long ago, it was believed that animals (and human babies) couldn't feel pain. Nowadays it's a ridiculous notion, but it was born of the idea that a certai…
Not at all. The caution about attributing human concepts to other animals is that they can have an arbitrarily different brain organization in such a way that stretches those notions beyond what we usually take them to mean. Does a tiger experience joy? If it does, what does joy feel like to a tiger? Is bird song language? What are they saying? That last question is obviously begging the question, are they saying any…
Depends on what you mean by language. If you mean "a structured system of communication", then it absolutely is. The only modern scientific rejection of birds songs as language is based around the definition of the word "language".
They're saying many different things such as "I'm ready to mate", "I'm hungry", "Stay away", "Come here", and "Predator nearby". Not only that, but birds are able to specify which kind of predator is nearby.
There's a resistance to these ideas that goes beyond objective science, and it's because we were previously basing our understandings on faulty assumptions. There's even a term for it, "human exceptionalism".
There are a few other plants that do similar mimicry of specific plants, but what's remarkable about B. trifoliolata is that it mimics such a large variety of plant leaves. Even leaves of some plants not found in it's native habitat! Even more remarkable is the fact that it does not require physical contact with a plant to mimic the leaves! As far as we know, this is totally unique