Similarly, female trees are charged to attract pollen to them. In most cities (in the US) trees planted on streets aren't allowed to be fruiting (because of rats?). Most fruitless/litterless trees are just the Dioecious male variety. This causes air quality issues as there is an over abundance of pollen in the air, which causes allergies and increased respiratory problems.
This article doesn't actually refute the main claims: Cities (such as the one I live in) only allow "fruitless" varieties to be planted on the streets. These varieties are generally of the full male variety, and thus only produce pollen.
Yes, this isn't "sexism" and no the female trees wouldn't hoover up all of the pollen produced...but it still a problematic practice.
Tree's are made of fairly well insulated materials and contain a vast amount of chemical reactions going on, they are also elevated from the ground, so they can experience the tribolectric effect (transfer of electrons through friction), as well as ionic charge due to moving nutrients up through their cambium. It's really not hard to imagine how they could become electrically charged at their extremities.
Someone measured tree branch tip to root resistance and while I don't quite understand the poor quality chart it's in kiloohms. The tree would need to radically change some of its biology. Like no capillaries from roots to branches. I'd say no chance.
As a sci-fi author, I love thinking about this kind of "what-if biology."
I presume, if such a phenomenon was possible, that it would work the same way electric eels work: by electrochemical (dis)charge. You don't need the whole organism to be ionized relative to its medium; you just need to form an ionic gradient at the surface of the organism, by using active metabolic processes (ion pumps) to hold ions — and thus electric charge — on the "wrong" side of a membrane.
Of course, electrochemical flux is an active process that takes work; it's not something any organism can do constantly forever. I imagine a tree that (hypothetically) did this, would only do it as a periodic "tug", maybe once a minute or so — sort of like taking a breath. Its evolutionary goal behind evolving such a feature, would presumably be to just to catch enough pollen, not all of it, and even a low-duty-cycle pull would work toward that goal.
Note that the ability of a thing to create an electrical discharge, is inextricable from the ability of the same thing to induce electrostatic forces on charged particles. Electric eels move charged particles in the water as they discharge into the water. And a tree that charged itself up to act as an ionic air-purifier, would (probably lightly) "zap" anything that touched it.
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Alternately, if we let go of the constraint that this is something all trees supposedly did, and instead assumed that this was something only some specific trees did — then those trees could do it by growing some electrically-insulated — and so likely dead-matter — tissue, near each pollen receiving organ (pistil). In other words, the tree's flower petals could act like mammalian hair does: able to be charged up with static even when the animal themselves is grounded. (And then they might not even need explicit charging — just interacting with the air while being electrically insulated from the rest of the always-grounded tree around them, might be enough to leave them with a slight constant charge.)
Evolution selects against this. You would have to release millions on a regular basis to consistently fight the "biological fitness" of self reproduction
The toy model of this that fits in my head, is the prisoners' dilemma as a gene: every generation has a local preference for that gene, but overall it destroys that population.
Ages ago now, and I think it's been debunked anyway, people were looking for a "gay gene" and wondering how it might remain in a population; one suggestion was that it would cause hypersexual andro-philia, making both men and women with that gene very much more into guys than normal — if that actually existed in that particular form, then (modulo both contraceptives for the women, and sperm banks for gay men who want to start a family) it would count as such.
Every time I come across a well made spider web, I always wonder how it started. How did the spider start here with the first thread and make it all the way to there? What's the algo the spider uses that determines the distances are not too far, or too far, or too small. Spider webs are impressive on so many levels.
One day after getting out of my car I let the door open for some reason, I came back to it maybe 15 seconds later and a spider had placed a thread between the far side of the open door and the roof of the car (a bit less than a meter long I guess), I watched it do the round trip a few times wondering how the hell did it do the first pass.
Any walk in denser forest on path not used frequently ends up with me having multiple of these single strings strewn across my face, and sometimes they dont come down so easily since they are sticky.
Most probably also on other parts of the body, but I dont sense it. Sometimes its so much I walk any narrower parts with my hands in the air in front of me, but I still often get bits on my face.
I would find a stick and wave it around in front of me for that very purpose. I also learned with my first camera in the 90s that came with "night vision" that the webs would reflect and be very bright. The stick was way more convenient and much cheaper
Read an article posted on HN were they said it is static electricity that allows ticks to "jump" onto their host. Looks like it is used by a insects in various ways.
Not sure if I agree with that. Maybe nymphs? Adult ticks use their legs like velcro and make swimming motions in the air when they detect prey. How they detect prey has always interested me - it really gets them dancing.
“This means that they don’t even need to touch flowers in order to pollinate them,"
So, the butterflies build up the charge as the fly around. Then they get near a flower and the pollen flies up and sticks to the butterfly. How does this pollinate other flowers? The pollen is stuck to the butterfly and not the flowers. Also, it seams it would mostly stick to the wings.
Just curios. It is a pretty amazing world around us.
„This pollen can then be deposited on subsequently visited flowers, either by direct contact, or similarly through electrostatic attraction, because the pollen can equalize to the potential of the pollinator, and will then experience an attractive force towards the electric field of the flower. Experimental evidence demonstrates this bidirectional electrostatic pollen transfer.“
I always hesitate to ascribe motives to non-human animals, but the butterfly shouldn’t particularly “care” whether the pollen gets from its body back to a plant. If the butterfly is eating the pollen, then maybe there’s an advantage to hoovering up more just by getting close, but that doesn’t mean it wants to give any pollen back to other plants.
On the other hand, if the butterfly is eating the nectar and the pollination is an ancillary effect, then you have to start invoking more complicated mechanisms. Maybe successful pollination of the plants increases the food supply later? Maybe the flowers are not neutrally charged, but instead become oppositely charged when the pollen is ready to bias pollinators to come close at appropriate times? You can always construct some just-so story that fits the observed evidence, but where it becomes science is when you make predictions and test them.
The butterflies are adults that do not need to grow, they just need energy, so they normally eat only nectar. They have a mouth adapted for sucking liquids, which could not be used to eat solid food, like pollen.
On the other hand, the bees collect both nectar and pollen. Nectar to provide energy for themselves (which they dehydrate into honey, which can be stored for a long time, unlike fresh nectar), and pollen, which is rich in proteins, to feed their larvae, which need to grow into adults.
I’m reading “The Light Eaters” which takes a broad look at plant behavior. It would not surprise me if the premise is inverted, that plants selected for electrostatically charged butterflies by selectively changing nectar availability.
This book gets recommended a lot here but in case you missed it, An Immense World (2022) by Ed Yong contains a ton of examples of animals sensing the world differently than we do - including electrical sensors and different frame rates of acquisition. He doesn't address it but it calls into question in my mind many of the studies about consciousness in other animals that deny its existence, like the mirror test.
I can relate to the butterfly. Growing up I played a game where you had a dragonfly buddy who helped you collect many small gems. If your health got low you had to collect them manually which was a pain.
> Any electrically insulated object, including an animal, is likely to accumulate charge as it moves through its environment, via a mechanism known as triboelectrification, or the triboelectric effect. The triboelectric effect describes the phenomenon wherein the separation of two materials formerly in contact with each other results in an anti-symmetrical deposition of charge on their surfaces. Whilst this effect is usually small, with repetition such as when rubbing two materials against each other, significant differences in charge can be created. The same principle applies to animals walking across and brushing past objects in their environment, including friction with the air when in flight.
> The triboelectric effect describes the phenomenon wherein the separation of two materials formerly in contact with each other results in an anti-symmetrical deposition of charge on their surfaces.
Does doesn't really explain how it happens, it just names it.
EDIT just found this on Wikipedia
> The details of how and why tribocharging occurs are not established science as of 2023.
So don't talk to me like you know anything. Knowing the name for the thing is not knowing the thing.
It seems to me that, in pointing you at the word for the phenomenon and providing cited quotes describing it as currently understood, GP was more helpful than if they had responded with the honest "no, nobody understands".
This article strengthens my belief that butterflies are some of the most metal animals out there. Flying around at 25mph? Metal. Drinking tears? Metal. Electrostatically charged?! Metal.
