Intelligence can be very useful in areas other than finding food. Active camoflague, air navigation, and social connections are all useful skills that require intelligence and provide benefits beyond finding food
What trade and activities would they be stopping for the sake of sunbathing? Whatever they might need is likely going to be availible in the sun
There are also other things that may be different with autotrophs. Consider their motivations: Unlike humans and other animals, which must go out of their way to look for food, autotrophs don’t really have to do much aside from reacting to the environment. This is going to impact the way they see and interact with the world
If you get found once, and can’t move, camouflage doesn’t work.
Sessile trees do communicate with their neighbors without having a complex language. They don’t have to run away from predetors or form tribes for cooperation.
The reactions of plants to their environment aren’t as colorful as animals. They don’t have an evolutionary arms race with herbivores which can’t be solved with “make more leaves faster, maybe higher”. Only plant/animal hybrids can be like animals.
maybe
I was thinking of a situation where they have enough sunlight to be sesssile in summer but have to move in winter to get energy another way.
the actual reason is actually just because earth animals became multicellular before gaining chloroplasts but there is also an animal that does have photosynthetic skin and it already sunbathed for warmth before gaining it. it is called the yellow spotted salamander
(1) Photosynthesis makes your macroscopic creature too heavy (wrong)
Let’s start with a 5 year old misconception, which was referenced again and again.
The mass of the blade of a leaf, according to the maximum thickness and densities here* is 0,00042 grams for every cm2. According to hhyrylainen’s calculation,^ humans have a surface area of 19000 cm2 and need 49000 cm2 of leaves to survive just from the sunlight. The leaves for those would weigh 7,98 grams and 20,58 grams respectively. Weight turns out to be negligible.
(2) Photosynthesis makes your microscopic creature too heavy (true, but its not clear if weight discourages this lifestyle, also macroscopic creatures can gain traits their microscopic ancestors didn't have)
The source for “photosynthetic stuff is heavy” was this
A chloroplast weighs 80 to 180 million daltons compared to the 10 million daltons of mitochondria. So it is true, at least for cells. But have we ever considered weight as a variable for microbes? They are in a very viscous environment, so an extra weight may even help them move. Imagine a feather moving in air compared to a rock.
But me saying any of this amounts to nothing without getting into fluid dynamics, and I don’t want to start googling a lot of stuff.
Even if bacteria divide into two camps, those that photosynthesize and sessile and those who are heterotrophs and mobile (which is not true because euglena has both a chloroplast and a flagella, but that may be a rare case scenario, anyway, let’s move on) the macroscopic creatures that evolve from them don’t have to have the same dichotomy. An animal may get the photosynthesis gene with horizontal gene transfer like the insect acyrthosiphon pisum, a plant animal hybrid can arise with symbiosis like in photosynthetic jellyfish and the salamander, or some plants which used to be sessile may start moving and fill animal niches without losing photosynthesis. As flagellas and cilias aren’t used in the macroscopic world for movement, both animals and plants should have been able to evolve movement independently. (I’ll get back to this in (11))
Note that most of the biomass in an ecosystem is made up of plants, animals are endemic compared to them. If every plant was able to become an animal, animals would face a lot of competition. Think of how all the south american animals went extinct when it got connected to a larger biogeographic realm*. I don’t think the animals would survive the niche competition with the plants (competitive exclusion principle [1]). We’d see creatures constantly moving up the trophic level, as the apex predators go extinct and get replaced by the descendants of herbivores and later the photosynthesizers. I am surprised noone called this the “animals are still here paradox. It is a nice question to ask.
There are plants which lost photosynthesis (the parasitic plants), but there aren’t ones which started moving fast, which leads me to think there are other problems.
(3) It takes too many branches to support all those leaves, you’d essentially become a tree (true, but that doesn’t prevent mixotrophy)
How can you create enough surface area so that you can feed your warm blooded lifestyle, and the very expensive brain? Easy, you don’t.
This may come off as changing the problem, but an animal that gets only some of its energy from the sun is still an animal plant hybrid[2]
I first thought that the plant animal hybrid may have skin extensions to increase the surface area. That may have some problems. First, those extensions would need to be connected to the rest of the body with blood vessels, so you couldn’t bend it and prevent blood flow to that tissue for a long time. Also if a predator was following you, it could grab it and pull you. If it wasn’t that strong, it could tear. Being dragged on the ground could also necessitate constant regeneration. If the contribution of that cloak to the rest of the organism is very little, getting rid of that would be ideal.
But, even without a cloak, just replacing the skin with one that has chlorophyl would be useful. It doesn’t have to supply you with all the energy you need. Humans have 38% of the surface area required to feed them, assuming half of it is in the wrong side of the body, it becomes 19%. If there was a mutation that caused us to get 19% more energy from the food we eat, that mutation would definitely be selected. The same is true for photosynthetic skin. It is basically a backpack that gives sandwiches, allowing you to survive longer periods of famine.
And yes, carnivores don’t keep a very long intestine like herbivores and don’t eat grass on their spare time, but 19% sounds like a good percentage and being under the sun doesn’t interfere with other heterotrophic activities.
The ecologic consequences
(4) Reduced evolutionary pressures would make mixotrophs uncompetitive against heterortophs(i am not sure)
Here is a silly sounding idea. Photosynthesis is too good to have.
Imagine there are two patches, A and B. In patch A, the animals can do photosynthesis, if they start starving, they start hibernating and only consuming sunlight. Because of this laziness, they haven’t even evolved legs, they move like snails. In patch B, the animals can’t do photosynthesis, when they start starving, their lives are at stake, so they evolve all types of adaptations to survive. When patches A and B combine, the animals of B, having better adaptations, drive the animals of A extinct.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it can apply to all types adaptations, not just photosynthesis. We don’t lack spleens because that would cause us to have better kidneys. Beneficial traits do get selected.
(5) If plant animal hybrids existed, plants would go extinct, and the hybrids would become the only plants, lowering the biomass of everyone above them, so no intelligence (depends on the planet size and how much energy plants use)
Imagine you are a photosynthetic goat. You climbed a tree, keeping it under your shadow. The difference between you is that both of you can do photosynthesis, but the energy you both get only goes to you.
Normally, you can’t cause a species to go extinct by hunting it too much, because lowering its population would cause you to starve, you would end up with lotka-volterra oscilations in population. A species can only go extinct if another species vies for the same niche and is more succesful. But if herbivores could also do photosynthesis, they would have the ability of driving plants extinct. This wouldn’t be the case for kleptoplasts, because they are still dependent on plants for photosynthesis.
In fact, you can say this already happened, as corals are more widespread than kelp or sea grass in some environments*. But corals are animals that did this while they were still sessile heterotrophs, and that isn’t what I want to talk about.
What if a mobile animal became the primary producer? First of all, there is a benefit to movement for plants, that is reproduction. We can observe this from the photosynthetic jellyfish, which has a mobile phase in its lifecycle for reproduction called the medusa and a sessile phase called the poly, oddly enough, the photosynthesis occurs in the mobile phase. I also want to limit this discussion to the seabed that is illuminated or the land.
Oher than reproduction, is there a benefit to movement? I previously thought there wouldn’t be.
Ignore the weight, it is negligible. But there is another problem with that. If you are a heterotroph trying to hunt a mixotroph, it isn’t you who has the advantage. The mixotroph can store as much energy as you (remember that plants also store oil in their seeds, which is a place that require compact energy storage), it can run as fast and as long as you. But it also has sun as a replenishing energy source. So the mixotroph can afford to keep running away from the heterotroph no matter how costly it is, because in the end, the heterotroph starves, not the mixotroph. Building a castle isn’t necessary.
But also not impossible. A tree could have arms, wielding a bony sword against a pack of violent herbivores in a scene that looks like a siege, completely different from the monotonous life of a goat. In fact this already happened.
It happened via a symbiosis between a plant and an animal. The fact that plants generate enough calories for movement, but why that movement is used against them is what I am questioning.
But let’s get back to the creatures that move all of their bodies. A mixotroph doesn’t just compete with heterotrophs. It also competes with autotrophs, because it doesn’t get all of its energy from the sun. All of the herbivores which would normally eat the mixotroph may give up and just start eating the plants, but the energy surplus of the mixotroph also gives it an advantage in foraging for plants, or just surviving famines, as I said before. The evolution of the first mixotroph may cause the extinction of both the plants and the animals!
Am I overreacting? Can mixotrophs coexist with heterotrophs just like how omnivory didn’t cause the extinction of all carnivores? I‘d say it I’m not overreacting . Adding photosynthetic skin to a heterotroph doesn’t have to change anything fundamental with it.
So what happens shortly after the extinction? Mixotrophs would be the only creatures around and they wouldn’t have a reason to move (and maybe can’t) all the time, so they would mostly be sessile. But they would be able to move. Imagine you land in an alien planet, but the forest starts running away from you.
I just noticed someone has to have roots to get water and nitrogen from the ground with roots, so the extinctions wouldn’t happen, or depend on if those stuff can be obtained another way. There would at least be decomposers or scavengers living under the ground which can’t do photosynthesis.
What would an ecosystem with more mobile primary producers be like? Since they spend more of the energy they produce, the higher trophic levels would receive less energy, and have less bimass (even if they can also do photosynthesis, because the total amount of sunlight the planet received didn’t change)
What does this say about intelligence? I still think innovation still requires a lifestyle filled with hardships. Humans were hypercarnivores for 2 million years, meanwhile the ants which had farming before us didn’t evolve intelligence.
(6) The mobility of plants would result in low genetic diversity and extinction (i am not sure)
Theoretically, only a single creature should be able to exist in a single niche, but that isn’t observed in planktons. Why?
A solution given to that is this.
If heterotrophs became mixotrophs, would they be able to invade each others locations, resulting in a single niche?
Less diversity in the primary producers could lead to less diversity in consumers (those that mostly consume). A niche that resulted in the evolution of humans may not appear. And what happens if all of that small number of species go extinct in a mass extinction, because a creature with the right adaptations didn’t evolve due to a lack of diversity? We may be lucky that earth didn’t have mobile plants.
Miscellaneous
(7) The ancestors of animals couldn’t photosynthesize (true, but what about alien worlds?)
If the first animals evolved below the photic zone, they couldn’t do photosynthesis. But there may be planets in the galaxy with only shallow seas.
(8) It takes too much space in the genome (probably not)
Dna requires compounds to build too. A cell with a larger dna may need more time to divide, which means slower growth and tissue repair. On earth, polyploidy seems to be common in plants*, 30 to 80% of the current plant species are polyploid. Does this suggest a preference for smaller genomes in animals?
But also, there is the g value paradox*, organisms tend to carry a way longer dna than they have to. I don’t think “trying to have too many things all at once” is the real reason for not having photosynthesis. And also, acyrthosiphon pisum is still around.
(9) Life is too short (wrong)
Building the photosynthesizing tissue could pay off in the long run, but if you just want to grow as fast as possible and reproduce as fast as possible, why even bother to build photosynthetic tissue?
This seems to explain the lack of mixotrophs without being an explanation that would make it seem like kleptoplasty shouldn’t exist. But not all animals live fast die young.
This explanation would also not work for any creature that looks after its young.
But maybe there isn’t a single reason mixotrophy isn’t common. Maybe it’s the little reasons that add up.
(10) What are the chances of photosynthesis and mobility evolving on the same organism? (depends on the probabilities, also horizontal gene transfer exists)
The oriental hornet is able to do some amount of photosynthesis, without the help of a plant species like kleptoplasts, photosyntetic jellyfish and the spotted salamander . Maybe this could be considered more similar to how we make vitamin d.
But the efficiency of the molecule it uses for photosynthesis, xanthopterin, is less than chlorophy*.
Maybe, instead of “why can’t animals photosynthesize”, we should ask the questions “why are there animals” and “why is there photosynthesis?”. The plants on earth may have not discovered chlorophyl and they would never have a high enough biomass for supporting a species like humans. Animals are also rare.
Maybe the real reason behind a lack of moving plants is because of bad luck. Maybe every branch of life experimented with photosynthesis, but one which succeeding in it was sessile. Any branch of life could have become mobile, but it wasn’t the plants.
But they can still end up in the same creature, as in the case of acyrthosiphon pisum.
The skin question
(11) You can’t make it into a skin (speculative)
Cnidarians are simple creatures, some of them have a mobile phase in their lifecycle and carry symbiont algae. Maybe, our ancestors also had a similar bodyplan, but they didn’t turn their symbiotic algae, if they had any, into a photosynthetic skin.
Animal/plant cooperation has evolved again though. The spotted salamanders take the algae inside their cells, while the kleptoplasts kill the cells, only take the chloroplasts. Chloroplasts on their own can only survive 9 months, but taking the cell as a whole may last as long as it needs
The spotted salamander lays its eggs on low oxygen ponds and uses the algae for the oxygen it generates. But it could have also used it as a “chloroplast that works” and used it for generating some energy.
There is a theory that different species can become a single species
If what’s theorised in wikipedia is true and the reproductive issue can be solved, then I think the photosynthetic jellyfish and salamander (they started later than the first life, but earth is habitable for one more billion year) could incorporate the photosynthetic species into their bodies and modify it into different tissues like a new germ layer.
But having some algae swimming between your cells or a plant spreading roots inside your body (you plant it on every egg) can also work.
Also, acyrthosiphon pisum exists.
(12) Chlorophyl/plast is often lost, and not gained back (could be the real issue)
If there were forest earth events in the past, like snowball earth, photosynthesis may have made less sense for animals (it is shadow everywhere). Mobile mixotrophy would normally be selected, but when chlorophyl is lost, it takes a very long time to evolve again, and maybe it doesn’t.
Other reasons for losing photosynthesis could be, constantly diving deep or going into the caves, lack of sunlight after impact or volcanism events, going nocturnal, evolving opaque body covering and entering environments the camouflage in which requires a color other than the color of the photosynthetic molecule. These reasons don’t make mixotrophy impossible. And if photosynthesis (or mobility) is lost, it can also be regained with atavism. But if it is completely gone, then that may stuck. It is known that ecosystems without mixotrophy can exist.
Related: But radiotrophy takes a shorter time to reevolve. All mushrooms used to have a radiotrophic ancestor.
Maybe they were using the more abundant UV light before the great oxidation created the ozone layer. When humans came with their nuclear reactors a short time ago, the mushrooms increased their melanin and started doing radiosynthesis again. There aren’t mobile radiotrophs around right now, but animals have melanin too, so who knows. Excited for Mars, anybody?
(13) Exoskeletons or fur is common, preventing photosynthetic skin (inconclusive)
Fun fact: sloths grow algae in their fur.
But they don’t have an Obligate symbiosis. The algae doesn’t get minarels and nutrients from the sloths body, and the sloth doesn’t receive calories from its skin.
Exoskeletons evolved before the endoskeleton. Trilobites couldn’t have been mixotrophic unless they had a long tongue. Can moss grow on a moving surface? I don’t know I am gonna call this inconclusive. Most fur doesn’t have algae.
Promising thoughts
(14) Plant cells weren’t flexible (if this is a trend, it could be the real issue)
If endosymbiosis is rare, not all branches of life may develop photosynthesis. But why didn’t any plant on earth became mobile? The reason may be because they can’t.
Venus fly trappers don’t have a free moving life stage, because they can’t evolve a tissue like muscles even if they wanted to.
Maybe it is a coincidence that earth doesn’t have photosynthetic animals, or maybe the photosynthesizers tend to have high HP cell walls, and can’t get rid of it to become mobile.
(15) If a drawback didn’t exist, acyrthosiphon pisum would be more successful (probably true)
It is exactly the creature that I am saying should exist, and be the norm. And it doesn’t suffer from the problem with plant cells. Granted, it is still soft locked to small sizes, because it doesn’t have lungs. But photosynthesis should give its descendants the advantage to fill all the other insect niches.
It also doesn’t suffer from the musclelessness problem of plants.
It is currently only 4 mm’s long. It has symbiont bacteria, but doesn’t need that to make its photosynthetic pigment. Wiki says
but this* website says there are also green versions of this insect, which I assume means chlorophyl, the best pigment known to nature. The endosymbiont bacteria of this insect is associated with plant viruses
they had this symbiosis for 160 to 280 million years. So anytime now. Mixotrophic insects can invade the planet.
Voting time
Whats your favorite solution to the lack of abundance of plant-animal hybrids observed by humans?
Its too heavy
19% isn’t worth it
One of the ecologic theories
It just didn’t evolve, due to luck
It’s the little reasons that add up
You can’t incorporate a photosynthetic species into your body
Chlorophyl often lost, not gained back
Slippery fur syndrome
Plant cells aren’t flexible
Something else
0voters
Which replaces which?
Plants become mobile and replace animals
Animals gain photosenthesis and replace plants
Both can happen, neither one would be fully replaced
First, the animals replace because they had an arms race forcing them too evolve better tissues, but after that, it is a numbers game so plants start replacing
Nothing replaces anything
0voters
You imagine the most common sight in the galaxy to be
A segregation between plants and animals
Trees with bony swords
Most common trophy is mixotroph
0voters
Plants and animals have different niches but niches change. They would compete eventually ↩︎
Not when you could instead evolve something that allows you to better escape predators or that allows you to acquire a more energy dense resource.
That’s just the weight of the leaves, but the leaves will also need a structure that supports them and that spreads them so that each leave will be able to acquire sunlight.
But I do agree that the “chloroplasts weights too much” is wrong.
Is not a paradox, animals already have all the adaptations for mobility while plants don’t, it is impossible for a plant to evolve mobility because animals would outcompete it from the start.
The type of mixotroph you are proposing would be unable to outcompete either plants or animals so it’s irrelevant, therefore also going against point 5.
They wouldn’t, because again, your mixotroph would be unable to use photosyntesis to sustain itself.
The photosynthesis would just slightly increase the time it can go without eating but nothing more, it still depends on plants as a form of primary energy source.
Also, you are forgetting about the materials that the herbivore needs to actually grow which they need to take from plants.
That’s not how it works thought, again, the mixotroph would not be able to sustain itselft using photosynthesis alone.
Also, your point completely ignores how endurance actually works, energy only makes a small part in it, endurance is mainly about your capability of preventing overheating.
No, your mixotroph would be unable to survive a famine that is long enough to kill a significant portion of other herbivore populations.
They wouldn’t be able to compete with plants (completely different niches) and if plants were to go extinct they would go extinct too.
They also would be unable to compete with heterotrophs and even if they were predation exists.
This makes no sense.
Irrelevant, in real life it isn’t about the presence of light or not, it’s about endosymbiosis.
Plants evolved after animals, they inherited mitochondria from their heterotrophic ancestors and then did endosymbiosis with proto-chloroplasts.
And no, Horizontal Gene Transfer won’t do anything since it’s endosymbiosis, the organism itself is incapable of creating chloroplasts because choloroplasts are technically another organism and you cant produce them on your own.
No it wouldn’t, and that they had the symbiosis for more than 100 million years is evidence of that.
I think you are saying that, there would be better things to evolve first, or that a creature that has both the escape predetor adaptation and photosynthesis would take a too long time to evolve. That could be the case. But photosenthetic skin is still the better option, provided that everything else is the same.
There are niches between a plant and an animal. A plant with a flexible cell membrane could first become decomposer, then scavenger, slowly becoming faster and starting hunting.
I am going to use the magic word. Hibernation.
Is overheating related to photosynthesis? Take two creatures, they aren’t exactly the same but have the same endurence, if one is given photosenthetic skin, would its endurence drop?
No… Those aren’t niches between plant and animals, those are niches that animals would occupy.
It isn’t a magic word, in hibernation they would be extremely vulnerable to predation since they need to be in a place where sunlight reaches and they still would need to get resources to survive and grow, mineral deficencies can kill.
Also, it would still be unable to compete with plants.
Why would they have the same endurance to begin with? By your logic all animals on Earth should be specialized for endurance.
Also, yes it’s endurance will drop since photosynthesis uses water and it would then have less water to use to control internal temperature.
Not if you would cover your skin with leaves without trying to get enough surface area for more than 19%. You would still try to increase your profile, but getting all the energy from photosynthesis isn’t the goal.
Anything can compete with similar niches, any side can win, that depends on some stuff, I don’t know what you mean
They can dig for nitrogen. They may only hibernate next to ponds, carry water or make symbiosis with something like mycorrhiza, and yes, getting under the dirt means you can get ambushed.
The reason I didn’t considered ambush is this
Cause the extinction of herbivores=> Ate too many plants, but their population dropped more than you, until none remaining
Cause the extinction of plants=> (not considering herbivores) ate too many plants, the population of plants decresed, but your population didn’t decrese like it should have been (not considering what the plant gets from soil) so you kept eating, until none remaining
If plants and herbivores are both mixotrophs, this no longer happens.
The reason I think these would ideally happen is that mixotrophs can do both of the jobs of plants and herbivores, making both obsolete. A plant can’t prevent predation and herbivore can’t survive without food.
I didn’t think too belgium that
It is about the prescence of light. If there is no light, there is no reason to be a mixotroph. If there is less light, well, somewhere between 100% and 0% of the energy being generated from light, it becomes not worthy to do photosynthesis.
The oriental hornet and the acyrthosiphon pisum are able to get energy from sunlight.
A mushroom is sessile, it is a niche an plant can get (while being mixotroph) without immediately evolving movement. The animal (maybe a mobile mixotroph) can also get it, they both would try to get it. It is also possible that this would take a billion years so it wouldn’t happen.
If the population of herbivores decrease, there isn’t anyone to use the oppurtunity of going after the vulnerable one. Yes, they can’t compete with plants if they have a hunter. I just noticed I am imagining there are 3 species but the mixotrophs can fight among themselves. I am not sure about this one.
Plants may remain always sessile.
Photosynthesis doesn’t have to be always on. The worst case scenerio, they are equal.
A support structure is something my example species didn’t need, because it only has one leaf, and the leaf supports itself, I feel like you’re thinking too close to " earth plant can walk", when you should be thinking about how it would evolve on a different planet from the cell up.
… So your mixotrophs can’t survive on photosynthesis? Do you realize that this completely demolishes all of your other points since they depend on the assumption that mixotrophs don’t need other energy sources?
Meaning of outcompete in English
outcompete
verb [ T ]
UK /ˌaʊt.kəmˈpiːt/ US /ˌaʊt.kəmˈpiːt/
to be more successful than someone or something:
Two commodities have been able to outcompete all other goods.
Societies that do not organize themselves effectively are outcompeted by societies that do.
BIOLOGY specialized
(of a type of plant or animal) to succeed in getting more food, space, etc. than another type of plant or animal:
Shrubs seem to outcompete grass in dry times.
Mink have been wiping out waterfowl and outcompeting the native otter.
This is what they can’t do.
You know what does these things but without the hibernation (and as such capable of growing and reproducing)?
Plants.
Neither can an hibernating mixotroph.
Neither can a mixotroph herbivore.
They also havent made plants and heterotrophic animals go extinct, their existence contradicts you.
Except mushrooms aren’t mixotrophs, and they are capable of maintaining a stable population because they don’t require the energy of an animal to survive and to reproduce they use spores which move using air currents.
What? Have you not heard of the existence of predators? Predators would have a much bigger incentive to hunt mixotrophs if the other herbivore populations decrease.
By the time in which they would evolve the capability of stopping their photosynthesis they would go extinct.
No… It doesn’t matter what shape it has it still needs a structure to keep that shape if it has a large surface area. In your case it uses light gasses (which is ambigous how they get them or even evolved to get them to begin with since initial stages would probably decrease the fitness of the organism), but that still wouldn’t be enough to support it.
nothing that gives you that stops photosynthetic bacteria from inhabiting your outer layer of tissue.
it also eats so eventually it would outcompete animals
and that is why they are mixotrophs and not autotrophs
but as you said it increases the time it takes to starve so yes that is how it works
and the mixotroph would likely have structures like the leaf slug to maximize surface area while minimizing the ability of predators to grab it easily and those structures would make it take longer to overheat
only if they didn’t eat to get minerals(which they have to to be mixotrophic) and have enough surface area to get enough energy from photosynthesis. and even then they could eat worms if they produce enough o2 for the worms to survive as the worms eat debris that is likely too small for the mixotroph to deem it worth the energy. also diatoms exist and would likely become endosymbiotes of aerobic organisms due to them producing oxygen and those organisms would be planktonic. also phytoplankton and zooplankton would not be competed with by macroscopic mixotrophs so the mixotrophs could become filter feeders
and where do you think photosynthesizing autotrophs have to be to live.
horizontal gene transfer happens between bacteria and eukaryotes as well as between those individual groups. normally it happens by the bacterium being engulfed and digested by the eukaryote but it can also happen over multiple generations. the first option however can only happen if the eukaryote does not chop up any foreign nucleic acids.
it is more just evidence that lungs are hard to evolve from something far less efficient than anything else because most insects have niches that require lungs due to them moving.
easy. just get up to eat sometimes, sleep in a safe place, and run away when found by predators. famines don’t mean no food but they do mean little enough food that no normal animal would survive one longer than a year. after enough time there would be no predators to worry about so they could just get up to eat when they are hungry and need minerals and sleep at all other times and eat dead members of their species or occupy a different niche to survive. like eating grass.
and that is a good thing.
there is water in the air. how do you think aloe vera gets water in deserts where it never rains or being on a porch with a roof while never being watered. the mixotroph could simply use the same tactic as aloe. also mitochondria make water through aerobic respiration.
says what evidence. a moving photosynthesizing organism that also eats could easily outcompete and outpredate a plant since they would be occupying the same niche as and eating the plant.
but if it can move it can run from predators
it can if it hibernates like a squirrel
but it can survive a famine far longer on the same amount of food
it actually don’t because it is purely up to chance whether or not a species outcompetes anything
the mixotrophs would consistently outrun the predators unless hunted by endurance hunters which are very rare to evolve
I have already wrote almost everything of what I wrote in this reply, as such you clearly misinterpreted everything on purpose (don’t say it wasn’t on purpose, because it would just result in you insulting yourself).
You also often went the BurgeonBlas way of avoiding to answer things.
Funny how you contradict yourself.
They wouldn’t survive with photosynthesis, photosynthesis would only make them capable of staying MARGINALLY more time without food. Any famine that would kill other herbivore populations would kill them too.
To outcompete animals they would have to be capable of sustaining themselves on photosynthesis. But at that point they don’t need to eat anymore.
Also, even if they were capable of staying a long time without eating (impossible) it would still not outcompete animals since it would eat less food and thus leaving more food for heterotrophs than another heterotroph would.
No, those structure would make it take less time to overheat since they would take a lot of sunlight.
They wouldn’t have enough surface area to sustain themselves using photosyntesis, that is impossible.
Irrelevant and avoiding to answer what I said.
Heterotrophs live there to, yet no photosyntesis.
Completely avoiding what I said, it wouldn’t give you chloroplasts.
Again, avoiding what I said.
We aren’t talking about those replacing all animals, but replacing all other non photosynthetic insects, which didn’t happen in more than 100 million years so it disoproves everything you say.
Eat what? They went in hibernation because there was a famine.
There is no safe place, remember that photosynthesis is a process that requires light, as such they need to stay in a place were there is light.
They are hibernating.
No, the predators would still be there, hunting them.
Irrelevant if it’s good or bad, I was disproving 50gens.
Do you realize that… It wouldn’t work? Taking water from the air would be too slow to replenish while running (no endurance specialized animal does that) and you are forgetting that heterotrophs have mitochondria too, so irrelevant.
All of your points depend on the mixotroph being capable of surviving without eating, as such you just avoided answering.
They can’t outcompete the plant because an animal needs much more energy than a plant, they can’t sustain themselves on photosynthesis (only remain marginally more time without eating, but it’s an irrelevant capability in long timescales) as such when plants start decreasing their population starts decreasing too.
Did you even read what I wrote? (of couse you did, you just are being intellectually dishonest by avoiding what I said) It can’t run from predators if it’s hibernating, it can’t reproduce if it’s hibernating and it can’t grow significally while hibernating.
They don’t hibernate, plus their tactic of staying in their nest wouldn’t work because the mixotroph needs light.
And no, it can’t stash food because we are talking about a famine.
Only marginally, it would make no difference in a famine that is capable of killing large portions of herbivore populations.
No it isn’t “purely up to chance”, if there is an organism more capable of extracting resource from a niche will outcompete the current holder of that niche.
Their existence still contradicts you.
They wouldn’t outrun the predators unless the mixotroph are endurance runners which are very rare to evolve.
Also, you are forgetting that endurance means little if the predators can reach you in a few seconds.
Also completely irrelevant if the mixotroph is hibernating.
how is that contradicting myself. a mixotroph is something that eats organic carbon sources and inorganic ones and processes the inorganic ones into organic carbon molecules
and that marginal amount of time is all it needs to be able survive a famine long enough to eat the organs of anything it would previously not have been able to kill. also a mixotroph would likely build up fat faster so it would survive longer without food and it would use up said fat slower meaning it takes more time to starve to death.
no. they would only need to be able to survive without food for longer.
yeah i often do that accidentally when i just woke up less than an hour ago
or it would be saying i was still half asleep. which i was.
they would build more fat and be able to keep it for longer so they would survive far longer without food than you think.
it could simply go in the shade and outrun the predator while leading it in circles in the shade where the predator would overheat faster. also sweating exists for a reason.
funny how you say that when in you also seem to think they don’t eat biological material. also they would just need wings to do that. specifically ones like the james webb telescope has for it’s camera but full of chloroplasts and made of skin with veins and thin but strong bones. if the organism can produce tantalum hafnuim carbide that is probably the best material for said bones
well could you include what you said in the quote so i can see what i misunderstood or avoided due to being half asleep.
because marine snow. it exists. it has entire ecosystems built around it. and it comes from the surface where there are photosynthesizers.
even if it didn’t it would give you their thylakoids and their RuBisCO which would make your cells be able to produce the innards of the chloroplast and if they got in a vacuole then boom. you got a chloroplast if some DNA from a chloroplast gets in it as well as some ribosomes get in that it starts replicating. basically biologically induced abiogenesis with extra steps
no it’s avoiding what you meant. i addressed exactly what you said down to the letter. i simply did not talk about what you meant because i do not have the ability to know what you were thinking at the exact moment you wrote that.
most insects occupy niches that require lungs due to the size requirements increasing the oxygen requirements beyond what using skin for gas transfer can handle. that is exactly what i said. if anybody you are the one pulling a burgeonblas.
food still exists during a famine. it just is in low supply.
if it is a famine on top of a large rock that no predators can climb onto is a safe place because birds that are looking for food will not be in the area if there is nothing they can eat or not enough for stopping to be worth it.
so do squirrels and they manage to run away when a predator finds their hidinbelgium.
no they wouldn’t it’s a famine, remember, the predators would starve because there isn’t enough food to survive without photosynthesis.
it wouldn’t always be running so it would be a good idea and it would likely go in water and only take water from the air when completely still in a cool environment or when submerged in water
i was actually taking that into account. and based on that fact and that photosynthesis produces oxygen from CO2 it should take less time for a heterotroph to diedrate due to more area contacting the air being required than if it was a mixotroph which produces some of it’s own oxygen and thus does not need as much surface area in it’s lungs and thus has less water needed to comfortably breathe.
i literally provided the definition of a mixotroph according to wikepedia but if you were too lazy to read that then a mixotroph is defined as: an organism which is able to acquire carbon and energy from organic and inorganic sources and use it to grow and reproduce
in the time it would take them to drive plants to extinction they would evolve to have the ability to gain enough energy from photosynthesis to acquire 50%-100% of their energy from photosynthesis since all it would take is modifying skin to have flaps and some support structures like bones that could just be a piece of another bone that is designed to create one splinter that is blunt so it doesn’t pierce the skin but thick enough to not be broken by the skin and is designed to grow so it stretches the skin so it can have the highest surface area possible
i was half asleep and tired of the voice that my brain uses when i read things you write so probably not very much
it can if it hibernates like a squirrel
yes but it is close enough to hibernation that the easiest way to describe it to anyone who does not actually care about the semantics is just calling it hibernation but if you do want to get into the semantics then read this
the nest could literally be on top of a tall rock.
what is your definition of a famine? a natural belgiuming disaster? because that is what how you are explaining a famine so far. also it could literally eat grass since according to 50gens it is an herbivorous mixotroph.
adipocytes exist and are energy storage cells which the mixotroph could use less of their fat storage in the same time with no food as a heterotroph and make more fat to store than a heterotroph based just off of the 19% that humans get with only one side exposed to the sun and any self respecting mixotroph that gained it’s ability to perform photosynthesis any time other than recently would have adaptations to increase that number.
literally everything is purely up to chance but for some things the chances are higher than other things and the chances of an animal that has predators outcompeting it’s predators are about the same as the chances of somebody brute forcing their way into a computer with a 14 word long password with 5 letters per word on average.
like you said, predators exist.
they wouldn’t need to be endurance runners if they can just run one second longer than their predators at the same speed which the adaptations necessary for maximizing energy for photosynthesis give you the ability to do
no predator that is not an ambush predator(like cats) would be able to do that without the mixotroph noticing 90% of the time when it is awake due to the noise doing that makes and if the mixotroph runs at the same speeds as it’s predators then that would make the predator not be able to catch the mixotroph. especially at night when most things that would try to hunt a mixotroph would hunt them.
Because it can’t outcompete animals while being a mixotroph.
No it wouldn’t, because it’s marginal.
Did you know? I adressed this scenario exactly under what you quoted.
You continue to avoid answering what I wrote, the quote was about even if they were capable of surviving longer they still wouldn’t outcompete animals.
Then why aren’t there animals that do this?
In case you didn’t know this, sweating is not unique to mixotrophs.
No, I’m just saying they wouldn’t be able to sustain themselves on photosynthesis alone, which your entire argument is based on. You are the one that thinks that.
Something so big would make them easily catched by predators.
I said that they wouldn’t be able to outcompete plants because of their nature as mixotrophs make it impossible for them to survive without plants to feed on.
You then went on how “they could eat diatoms” which is irrelevant since your point on how they could outcompete plants was that they would feed on them and make them extinct.
Again, you are not understanding what I’m saying. You claim it to be so easy for mixotrophs to emerge and take over yet it never happened.
This is what I wrote in answer to what 50gens wrote, you didn’t address why their descendants didn’t take over all insect niches.
Insects don’t have active respiration. You realize right that the animals we were talking about are insects? If other insect species are capable of taking a niche their descendants would be capable of it too if mixotrophs are as good as you claim them to be.
Exactly, by the time they will need to stop hibernation to search for food they will have decreased energy reserves causing them to die since being active consumes much more energy than when hibernating.
You are basing them surviving on a very specific geological formation that they can climb while a predator can’t? Assuming the existence of these highly specific geological formations (assumption which alone should make you discard your claims if you were to use Occam’s razor) in the time the mixotrophs evolve to climb these formations there would also be predators evolving to do the same in order to hunt the mixotrophs.
The mixotrophs are there (and I already explained how your explanation doesn’t hold).
So you agree that it wouldn’t work.
You are literally avoiding answering what I said, but don’t worry, you can read it again here:
See? Your points depend on the mixotroph not being a true mixotroph.
If you don’t believe me read the following:
Your point depends on your mixotroph not being a mixotroph.
Also impossible since just BEING an organism capable of moving like animals takes much more energy than plants.
If it “hibernates” like a squirrel it would use much more energy.
If there is food then it’s not a famine, so you can’t say “they could eat grass” because then it isn’t a famine.
If there is a famine it would be significantly harder to find food to stash, so they wouldn’t be able to make a stash before hibernating.
Exactly, but unlike your points, the existence of predatos are evidence that mixotrophs would be unable to outcompete animals.
That’s assuming that they run at the sane speed, also, the adaptations for maximizing the energy from photosynthesis (at least the ones you listed) would actually make it harder to run.