A few days ago I shared some news that the Eurovision song from Israel would be named “Your land is mine now” to later realize it was from an onion kind of website, lol.

I hope I’m not alone in this kind of f’up.

  • Typhoonigator@lemmy.world
    9·
    10 months ago

    Oh man, sometimes yes but sometimes not so much. Know how humans have 23 chromosomes? And we’re diploid, which means they come in pairs of 2?

    Some plants have a few more pairs than that - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyploidy And some plants have way WAY more than 23 chromosomes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organisms_by_chromosome_count There’s a plant at the bottom of that list that has 1260 chromosomes.

    I only took 1 botany class back in college, so I don’t know or remember enough to talk about this in more depth. I really only know enough to be shocked by how crazy a plant’s genuine can be.

    • pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6·
      10 months ago

      The way I’ve had it explained to me, plants as a general rule have a much, much larger genome than animals. The reason is simple. When an animal runs into a problem like not enough water, it can just get up and move. Plants are rooted where they are, prey to whatever comes along. They have to develop an arsenal of genes to deal with different situations, whether that’s drought resistance or producing various toxins so that animals don’t make a meal of them. It’s not like animals don’t do this to some degree - the immune system is incredibly elaborate - but not as much.