I'm skeptical that this discovery amounts to a "new type of coexistence". Fungi that are facultatively lichenized (having growth forms that include or exclude algae) have been known about for a long time, as have various stages of sophistication of the lichenized condition. I can find references dating back to at least the 1980s that describe various kinds of facultative lichenization. The authors' insistence that the symbiosis is not a lichen just because the mycobiont (fungal partner) has a free-living form is suspect: previous literature makes no such distinction. The relevant distinction here is not between lichen vs. non-lichen, but facultative vs. obligate lichenization. The observation that the mycobiont can be free-living and "does not depend on its alga for nourishment" does not imply that it doesn't derive nourishment from its algal partner once the partnership is established.
There's no major news here that I can see. The main value of this research is simply that it provides the first description of facultative lichenization occurring in a particular group of under-studied fungi (corticioid basidiomycetes).
I bought the book hoping it wouldn‘t be too esoteric. I read the first two pages, wrote „you are what i feared“ on the second page and threw it in the corner out of frustration.
I didn‘t judge by the cover, i judged by the introduction.
Was I too quick, though? Should i reconsider reading it?
I'd certainly consider "describing a real example of a hitherto conjectured form of symbiosis" news enough. Publications aren't only for major news, the vast majority are "just news". This is a new thing, it's worth writing about. Whether this still qualifies as a lichen and we just need to update the canon around lichens, or whether this needs a new name because it behaves fundamentally different from how we understand lichen is entirely up for debate, and not one that this research tries to answer.
But it's not a "hitherto conjectured form of symbiosis". It's just another example of facultative lichenization, which has already been observed in species quite widely scattered across the fungal kingdom. That to me doesn't count as a "new type of coexistence". The actual research behind the headline is valuable and entirely worthy of publication (I've made similar contributions myself), my critique relates to the headline, the angle of the reportage.
Welcome to the internet, I guess. The only way science websites get clicks is with these idiotic titles. Ignore them, read the article, judge it on the actual text's merit.
>The donated shoes that ended up in Indonesia have added to a flood of illegal second-hand clothing pouring into that developing country, according to a senior government official there, who said such cast-offs pose a public health risk, undercut its local textile industry and often pile more waste into its already bulging landfills.
Many different groups of fish have independently evolved locomotion by "walking" on modified pectoral fins. One of my favorite examples are the bamboo sharks, among which are some pretty recently described species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiscyllium_halmahera
There’s the reward conferred by being able to get further into shallow areas and take advantage of the additional food options they might offer over and above what’s available in deeper water. Transition zones are abundant with life and thus food.
From the introduction, which starts by trying to give some wider taxonomic context:
>The genus Ilex comprises about 450 species growing in the tropical regions of South America and Asia. Ilex trees are located exclusively in South America...
The roughly 500-600 species in the genus Ilex are commonly called hollies and include the European Christmas holly, I. aquafolium. The genus overall has a worldwide distribution over both tropical and temperate regions, there is no particular concentration of diversity in the South American tropics. Strange to get basic facts so wrong in the opening sentences.
"Ilex trees are located exclusively in South America: in northern Argentina, southern Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay, where they cover an area of approximately 540,000 km2." That's the range of Ilex paraguariensis, the species from whose leaves yerba mate is made, not Ilex trees in general.
A related species is Yaupon Holly that grows all over the Gulf Coast region from Texas to Florida.
That one is Ilex vomitoria and is the only native caffeine producing plant that grows in north America. I make tea from the leaves after roasting them for a few minutes on low heat. You can find Yaupon Tea for sale in quite a few places now after articles about it appeared a few years back.
It is a hardy bush that can form thickets that are nearly impenetrable. It is used as a landscape plant here in Texas and most nurseries carry dwarf varieties that form hedges. I prefer the trees. They can reach 20' tall and are covered in berries during winter. On the coldest days here in N Texas the birds descend on my trees and feast until everything is gone.
I agree that it seems like they ignored a lot of related plants in their description.
Do you have a Yaupon brand you can recommend? I tried some in college and found the taste too bitter (like the leaves had been improperly-stored for way too long, kind of like how basil tastes when poorly-dried).
But I'm very into the idea of finding a good Yaupon, insofar as it reduces the carbon footprint of shipping things around the world & such.
I have several large yaupons growing on my place and I use the leaves from them.
There are quite a few outfits selling yaupon tea now and they are based all over the Gulf Coast. I haven't tried any commercial teas since reading about yaupons several years back. It looks like everyone and his dog who has ever tried to figure out what to do with all the yaupons on their property has chosen to market tea leaves. Some look like actual orchards but many advertise they sustainably or organically prepare the leaves. To me that means that as soon as they get an order they head outside to the thickest place and trim some branches and then go roast them and bag them up for shipping.
There are several outfits that distribute through grocery stores here in Texas. They sell blends of yaupon with other herbs. I'm not really an herbal tea person. I like a Earl Grey, a Chai, a green tea, etc but when you start throwing flowers in I brew some coffee. I understand that Earl Grey has bergamot but it isn't the main character get to do the tea leaves do the talking.
https://www.texteacompany.com/ Piney Woods in East Texas. They look uncommitted to the task since they are surrounded by yaupon but claim to be out of stock. LOL
Those are all Texas yaupon tea companies. There are also others in the Carolinas, and other Gulf Coast states.
It does make a great tea which you can drink alone or with a sweetener like honey.
You’re right, it’s wrong, but not that wrong. Several sources indicate the majority of Ilex species occur in South America and Asia, so that was probably what they meant to say. Ilex paraguariensis is limited to Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina, and are clearly the “Ilex trees” referred to in the second sentence quoted. So, yeah, it’s imprecise and syntactically sloppy but not that far out, and not the main point of the paper, but as Jack Reacher says, “details matter”.
It's woefully wrong for something in the primary literature. Yes, I understood what information they were sloppily failing to be precise about. If I were refereeing this paper I'd insist on a correction.
SALT_VERSE just uses still images generated by DALL•E-2 and Midjourney. They're animated using techniques that have already been around for a long time: panning around and zooming in and out of a larger frame, fake raster-to-3d effects (auto projection mapping), typical After Effects transitions. There are some overlaid face animations done with something along the lines of NVIDIA's Audio2Face. None of it is video generated by SD, DALL•E-2 and Midjourney.
The biological term "symbiosis", by itself, in the strict sense, doesn't imply a benefit for both parties, it just describes a persistent and physically close association between two species. Hence parasitism or commensalism are also forms of symbiosis and so are associations which are not obligate, but facultative (both bionts can live without the other, however prevalent the association). "Obligate symbiotic mutualism" is the category for what you're describing. "Endosymbiosis" implies such an integrated relationship that it is at least obligate for the endosymbiont. In this human-mite case there are various claims of benefits and drawbacks to humans from the relationship, and the symbiosis is certainly already obligate for the mites.
Psilocybin-producing mushrooms are widely dispersed across the clade of all other true mushrooms and their genomes clearly show there is no great mystery about their evolutionary history or relationships to other fungi. Modern phylogenetics completely discredits panspermia as an origin for particular species or groups of fungi: they all share a single common ancestor and they are all connected to our single Tree of Life as with every other known lifeform on Earth.
Tunicates evolved long before animals that you would recognize as typical vertebrates. In their free-swimming larval state, tunicates do have a "notochord", or nerve chord, running along their head-tail axis. This structure is a kind of proto-spine. The evolution of true vertebrates proceeded from this condition by neoteny, the retention of larval traits in the adult body plan. Pyrosomes look so bizarre compared to a layman's notion of what a chordate should look like because they are colonial aggregations of lots of individual adult tunicates that have resorbed their notochords (I'm pretty sure that's the case, despite what the photo description says).
It makes sense in the context of tonal harmony. An octave is the interval between the 1st and 8th notes of a major or minor scale. I.e. a major or minor scale repeats itself (at double the frequency) every eight notes. A major third is the interval between the first and third notes of a major scale, and so on.
Were you implying that a different kind of everyday notation exists that could be a significant improvement on the traditional system? I understand that various alternative notations can give a clearer presentation of single aspects of music, and I know of some in use for specific instruments and genres/styles, but overall, as a general purpose encoding, standard notation seems to be a well-optimized compromise arrived at by real working musicians over the centuries. Notation has to convey a lot of musical information beyond pitch specifications and relationships. Speaking as someone with good sight reading ability at the piano, and who's heard better pianists sight-reducing orchestral scores even, sheet music doesn't lack clarity, and saving just the right amount of ink also means having a readable format.
I'm a double bassist, and even as an amateur, my ability to function in ensembles and get hired by bands over the past decades owes a lot fluent sight reading ability.
Musical notation provides a kind of symbiosis between composers / arrangers, and players. If you want to work, you have to read standard notation. If you want your material to get played, you have to write it in standard notation. And learning any notation to the point of sight-reading it is prohibitively difficult for most people, including good musicians who learned without reading.
Experiments with developing new notation tend to involve a cooperation between the composer and willing players, often in an academic setting. It's also a wide open field for electronic and computer aided music, where sight-reading might not be an issue at all.
I find the 'piano roll' visualisation, as used by most major sequencers/DAWs is a much more intuitive way of showing how chords and intervals work, precisely because it is proportionally spaced.
I'm not saying traditional notation isn't useful, I'm saying it's unhelpful if you're trying to understand how music actually works.
A piano roll visualization gives a somewhat more immediate depiction of intervallic information. But it isn't absolutely proportionately spaced, it's mapped to keyboard topology. Two neighboring white keys could be a major or minor second apart, etc. (And if real piano topology is shown, asymmetric positioning of black keys mean that identical intervals with one white key and one black key are different in span.)
In relation to the staff, pitches in standard notation are just as "proportionally spaced". Instead of squeezing in black keys, you have to squeeze in accidentals, but then accidentals are an extremely useful way of "showing how chords work", especially in the context of progressions in tonal harmony, which a piano roll gives you no meta-information about. It's less intuitive only in that you need some study to parse it fluently, at which point you gain the advantage of being untied to the layout of a particular physical instrument.
In any quest to "understand how music actually works", as soon as you take some baby steps beyond the basic alphabet of intervals, a piano roll visualization is going to hold you back.
In all the software I've used, it is proportionally spaced. You're just used to thinking the old way. Trust me, the whole thing is a lot simpler if you just accept 12 equally spaced semitones, with 7 of them in play for any particular key.
I don't trust you. You're just used to thinking in terms of the piano keyboard. As I said before, the distance between two adjacent white keys on a piano roll could be a major second, or it could be a minor second. In other words the same distance encodes different intervals. You don't know which it is until you also examine the position of the black keys. A keyboard where the twelve semitones were actually equally spaced would not have groupings of two vs. three black keys. Looking at the adjacency of the keys trivial to do, but so is reading an accidental, which gives you additional information about the functional role of the pitch it alters.
OK, I looked at some piano roll layouts in DAWs, and found examples with equal spacing between semitones, you're right.
I looked at some music mapped onto this layout. The layout allowed for speedy recognition of lone intervals and simple chords, but no more so than standard notation, and it was far worse than standard notation at showing any higher level musical content (the harmonic function of those intervals and chords in the context of the whole piece or local progression, polyphony and independent voices in general, counterpoint, organization of rhythms and cross rhythms, phrasing, larger compositional structures...). Also, because it's just a homogenous field of repeating piano octaves there is much less to positionally anchor the eye on as it reads through, like a staff with ledger and bar lines and key signature would provide to a fluent sight reader. All this musical meaning is stripped away and to reinstate it would be a case of painstakingly decoding the piano roll rather than just fluently reading the music.
I can see how this layout is really useful in a DAW for MIDI input and editing. As for learning the absolute basics of harmony, yeah it's accessible, if you can't be bothered to learn the basics of standard notation. After which point it's a dead end.
Thanks. The piano roll helped me to look at things from first principles - to see how, say, progressing chords towards a change of key you can pivot into the 'allowed' semitones of the new key. Learning about music, the jargon is quite dense, epsecially with the naming of chords and intervals. Thinking of a fifth as seven semitones (and a 2/3 frequency ratio) and so on made it more digestible for me. But perhaps it is a dead end, I might have to take your word for that. Maybe its something like how in chemistry, learning the Bohr modelof electron shells helps you grasp the structure of the periodic table, but then to really get further you have to forget all that and start again with the valence electron model.
Those same relationships are apparent when reading a traditional score. Once you reach a certain level of proficiency reading music it's easy to spot the intervals which make up a chord as written. I don't think the same amount of proficiency isn't needed to interpret a piano roll, it's just proficiency in seeing the same relationships notated differently.
All that to say I think they're both conveying similar pitch information and take a similar amount of effort to ready correctly. Piano roll doesn't convey rhythmic information and that's where I think piano roll falls short as a method of straight notation.
Imagine you are composing a piece of music that will move through a series of key changes (as most pieces of music do). On a piano roll you can see exactly which semitones are shared in common by the different major and minor keys. You can map your way through the transitions visually. A major triad uses 4 and 7 semitone gap, a minor triad uses 3 and 7. It's all so much simpler and clearer if you are starting from scratch.
Traditional notations are obsessed with pretending there are only 7 notes when there are in fact 12. Accidentals and key changes are obfuscated.
How are accidentals obfuscated on a traditional score? They are explicitly marked. It's on a piano roll that they would be easy to miss -- they appear the same as any other note.
Similarly, key changes are explicit in sheet music but hard to see on a piano roll without careful inspection.
What's obfuscated is the _actual_ semitone interval between the accidental and the other notes around it. And the actual semitone interval is the most important bit of information - it's what our ears hear.
I think what you're missing is that a big part of the design of traditional music notation is that it is intended to be read easily and efficiently, even sight-read. The musician reading the score knows the intervals that apply in the given key, down to muscle memory. The fact that a note lies outside the key is important, and that is why an accidental is marked explicitly.
Likewise, when a musician sees a run of adjacent notes without accidentals, they immediately know what to play. They don't need to inspect each one in turn to determine how many semitones it lies from the previous note. Likewise, when a composer wants to write such a run, they can just draw some black dots in a row. They don't need to squint at a grid and select the correct rows each time.
To sum up, traditional notation is uses a form of compression that makes reading and writing diatonic music easier.
Taking this even farther, some systems of music notation compress things even further and don't explicitly list all of the notes to be played. For example: figured bass, basso continuo, or even just chords that accompany lyrics. In fact, even regular sheet music doesn't usually precisely represent of duration of all of the notes. Some notes are sustained and bleed into others, some are meant to be played strictly in time. Human interpretation is an important part of the process.
On the other hand, the piano roll is a MIDI editor. It is a great way to tell a computer exactly what to play, but it is not easy to read quickly and it is impractical to print or write by hand. Both forms of notation have advantages and disadvantages but it seems to me you haven't spent enough time with the standard notation to fully appreciate its advantages. In other words, the piano roll notation might be your blub language for music. [1]
Fine. But I'm saying if you want to actually understand how music works (rather than play an instrument) the standard notation IMHO
actually gets in the way.
Because the most important thing is the actual semitone intervals, and the standard notation hides them and gives them weird names like augmented fourth (it's just six semitones, just call it that). And it names the 12 semitones based on the c major mode even though that's only one of about 50 modes/scales/keys you might want to use.
There's no major news here that I can see. The main value of this research is simply that it provides the first description of facultative lichenization occurring in a particular group of under-studied fungi (corticioid basidiomycetes).