Understanding it needed to do that is a bit of personification. The Venus fly trap that grew a slightly taller flower stem got pollinated more. That genetic mutation overtook the species as competition for pollination grew more difficult for the shorter flower stemmed. Evolution is cool an all, but let’s not confuse it for plants knowing or deciding to do anything.
not only native, but the ONLY place. I've got carnivores from every continent (accept Antarctica, obviously), and thats STILL my favorite fact.
It does make sense they're so rare though. Most carnivory you can picture the evolutionary path: Something had a mutation that kind of made a cup, something had a mutation that kind of made the leaves sticky... etc. You can see it happening one step at a time with minor advantages (and therefore survival) at each step, until they kept compounding into more and more complex and specialized structures.
For a VFT... multiple things had to happen at once. There's no advantage to the motion until you can also digest and adsorb the material. There's also no advantage to a partial motion that can't trap an organism. It's really wild they exist!
Just a random guess, but I could see the argument that it would reduce crash bleed into the rest of the kit. It might make it easier to mix the main kit more tightly. But if that’s the case, then why leave the hihat low? It might just be a stylistic thing or it might be for the drummer to remember to not ride the crash. I dunno. It’s certainly not standard. They’re the only ones I’ve seen do it on such a small kit.
Edit: I just realized it’s probably up so high so the drummer doesn’t accidentally kill their pollinators
But if that’s the case, then why leave the hihat low
Because the hihat is probably being accessed far more frequently, which both means it doesn't really need to be separated from the "main kit" in the mix as much (it is part of the main kit!), and means that the ergonomics of making the drummer play that way would have a much bigger impact on their drumming.
Victory bell is probably based off of highland pitchers (Nepenthes). Fun fact: In some parts of the world they're called "monkey cups". I don't know if the monkeys actually drink out of them or not but that's where the name came from lol.
Also, the energy to make that flower is an enormous strain on the plant. Usually, growing that flower causes most or all of the carnivorous leaves to die, and therefore often growing that flower spells the death of the plant.
That's not really how it works.
Going from one food chain level to another you lose about 90% of the energy like:
Plants - photosynthesize 100% of solar energy available
Herbivores - eat the plants, losing about 90% of the total energy in the process of breaking it down and making it usable.
Carnivores - eat another animal, losing another 90% aka (1% of total energy)
Plus, consider that photosynthesis is capable of creating all the sugars and that we can convert sugars into fats and proteins and stuff using biological processes (this is essentially why plants need nitrogen and phosphorous to grow, but the generally get that from the soil and really don't need a lot.
The specific nutrients it gets from the bugs are nitrogen and phosphorus, which plants normally absorb through their roots. It evolved carnivory to compensate for the poor soil in its native habitat instead of developing its roots like other plants in the area, so it can't pick up the nutritional slack with its atrophied roots.
In addition, every time a leaf closes and tries to digest what it caught, it uses a lot of energy. Flowering always is a big strain on a small plant, no matter what species, so when this strain is introduced the number of carnivorous leaves becomes a difficult risk/reward calculation, and plants are not known for cleverness.
We're used to getting our energy and building blocks from our food. Plants get their energy from the sun, and their building blocks from the air (CO2). They get water and some minerals, but a plant is made up off solidified air. It's like if you could be solar powered living off just air, water, and an occasional multi-vitamin.
Anyway, carnivores don't really get energy from their prey, just the nutrients. It's like self fertilizing.
Which I think is really fine for casual internet conversation. It's not even attributing human characteristics, just mis-characterizing what is happening. But it's a useful way to short hand it, especially if the discussion is more about the result than the process.
Yeah, there's absolutely nothing about the wording of this post that indicates they actually believe "it's learning" as opposed to just using quite a common shorthand. Calling that out is the laziest, most bad-faith type of "um, actually" behaviour IMO.
Personally, I'm not a fan of these shorthands, because I've seen many people (including me when growing up) make some pretty glaring logical errors based on them. And particularly with creationists also existing, I'm really wary of people thinking it's an intelligent process.
Agreed, and I spent like a decade in protein engineering and pre-biotic chemistry.
And if someone really wants to be a pedant about it, go ahead and prove conscious "intent" is inherently different than, not just a more complex form of, what's going on here. If someone's managed to solve all of the philosophy around consciousness, self, and intent, they could really save us all a bunch a time! Until then, pedantically, you're not wrong to say the plant "knows" to do this as much as I "know" to pay my rent; it's all just chemical reactions based on environment.
... Or we could allow people to enjoy the pressures and reasons that give rise to the subtle aspects of organism in this complex ecosystem we call earth without being a dick about it, and trust that the level of language specificity will increase/decrease commiserate to the degree of precision the topic requires.
go ahead and prove conscious "intent" is inherently different than, not just a more complex form of, what's going on here. If someone's managed to solve all of the philosophy around consciousness, self, and intent, they could really save us all a bunch a time!
Genetic mutation is always occurring. It's not trial and error, there is no intent to do anything. You make it sound like a function but it seems like more of a failure to me.
Evolution works like a tree's structure branches over time. That's why it's always animated like that. It is NOT that everything gets expressed and then gets tested. It is that the current thing "alive" is changing. It seems crazy now only because you're seeing the veeeeerry complicated leaves at the ends of very complicated branches. Branches that have mostly ended by now.
You know what happens to animals with unsurvivable mutations? They die. All the time. Even humans with unsurvivable mutations happen ALL THE TIME.
That's why it's ridiculous to outlaw abortion: Bad things randomly happen all the time, because it's a complicated process with LOTS of areas that can go wrong. It goes wrong all the time. The body has mechanisms to fix a lot of "wrongness", but macro-level bad stuff still happens all the time.
The same thing happens on a species level over many survivable generations.
It IS basically "trial and error", but trial and error in a VERY complicated and dynamic system after a very, very long time, currently stemming from the complicated results of that system.
You cannot dismiss the system just because one aspect confuses you when removed from context...
