this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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The best way to never go extinct is to be usable by humans
Best way to go extinct is much the same.
Shrödinger's extinction
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I actually thought about that and changed "enjoyed" to "usable"
Dodos were tasty and Vaquitas are cute but chickens, wheat, potatoes, rice etc. are a borderline infinite food glitch for humans compared to most food sources so they naturally get cultivated in huge numbers
Mmmmm, tasty Dodo bird.
For every dodo there's a cow and for every chicken there's a giant tortoise 🤷
Hemp / marijuana is arguably the most successful plant at this. It enjoys a high degree of biodiversity where as most plants we cultivate suffer from monoculture problems. Why is hemp / marijuana so successful? Probably because of its multiple uses. It makes strong fibers, you can make milk from it, you can make all sorts of consumer products like lip balm and hair conditioner, and you can get fucking ripped bro
Both by using it as a protien supplement and a psychoactive chemical.
See also Brassica Oleracea aka wild cabbage which we've cultivated into cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, collard greens, savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, gai lan.. etc
we've even cultivated it into magical artefacts, romanesco broccoli
I love the texture of cooked romanesco, it's as if potatoes and broccoli got together and decided to have a fractal baby
Fun fact, apparently nature can only do fractals 4 levels deep. This works for romanesco, fern, and tons of others. I am yet to find an outlier.
From what I can find there are 700 strains of cannabis
There's 4000 varieties of potato
Where did you find that about hemp? I can only find info about recreational marijuana and can't find anything about agricultural or industrial hemp. And the recreational marijuana numbers I could find are all just like "top 30 strains to try today"
Leafly lists 6,822 cannabis strains. Though 'strains' or more aptly cultivars are often not reflective of the actual underlying chemical nature of the plant [source]. They are ultimately not very meaningful in general.
Based on this database, Europe has 104 varieties of hemp registered.
Canada has 87 but there is probably overlap.
Though potatoes and cannabis aren't really a fair comparison for many reasons. There are a lot of different species of potatoes with major chromosomal differences but cannabis only has 3 species.
It's also not really fair because potatos are one of the easiest plants to monocrop with how you can propagate them without seeds.
Yeah its a major problem in particular with the Idaho Gold being far and a way the most commonly grown potato to meet McDonald's demand for long fries that stick up out of the little fry nest
It depends, silphium was potentially an effective contraceptive that was harvested to extinction.
The difference in survival probably stems from a single hyphen.
Mint grows like a fucking weed. Silphium grew like a fucking-weed.
You aren’t kidding. I got four tiny spearmint plants this spring. They are growing kind of hydroponically because I have a pond.
In less than three months, those plants have exploded into huge nice-smelling bushes that are more than two feet in each dimension. They are planted in a line so there’s this walk of mint that’s almost 12 feet long.
But that’s not enough. The plants send out branches along the ground like freaking tentacles. They will spill out of a planter box, for instance.
The fast growth is why I chose this plant, but damn!
You're going to battling mint for decades to come.
My mom made that same mistake more than 20 years ago. The original plants are long gone but I am still dealing with mint in my garden and just everywhere. It takes over the lawn.
The smell when you run the lawnmower, though... Heaven
Similar is happening to Western Yews for cancer meds, I think. Whether it survives depends on how easy it is to tame if only intensive agriculture will supply the demand. And then there's the question of whether it's still the same thing -- looking at you, broiler chicken.
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