My first post here (sorry to be a lurker), but of all the great spineless ones on this post, my favorite is the romanesco cabbage, since it’s the one I regularly eat. Are there other edibles here? Can you elighten me?
I’ve eaten less than a third of the organisms shown here (in a general sense…I haven’t eaten fire ants, but have had ants), but who knows? Maybe they’re all edible!
I’m going to have to try serving up a slice of a gall to the family…maybe I’ll tell them it’s a pancake.
That is a magnificient Crown Gall! Agrobacterium is such an amazing orgnanism, it had to be intelligently designed it just had to… What good would a Ti plasmid be be without every one of the proteins produced by the vir genes? If you take out one protein the whole system fails, it must have been constructed as an entire biochemical pathway all put in place at once. Like a molecular machine, if you will.
I kid, I kid.
But seriously, where the heck did that thing come from?
I’m going to have to go with some kind of viral horizontal gene transfer to bacteria myself.
wcamps says
Dr. Myers,
My first post here (sorry to be a lurker), but of all the great spineless ones on this post, my favorite is the romanesco cabbage, since it’s the one I regularly eat. Are there other edibles here? Can you elighten me?
wcamps says
er… ENlighten. I even previewed that one. Ugh.
PZ Myers says
I’ve eaten less than a third of the organisms shown here (in a general sense…I haven’t eaten fire ants, but have had ants), but who knows? Maybe they’re all edible!
I’m going to have to try serving up a slice of a gall to the family…maybe I’ll tell them it’s a pancake.
Torris says
wcamps – What does romanesco cabbage taste like?
g says
A sea urchin? Spineless? Um …
coturnix says
Oooh – I love the concept! Pretty pictures. Now I have to go read all this stuff!
coturnix says
Oh, the Uropetala image links to Collembola post….
wcamps says
Romanesco cabbage tastes very close to cauliflower. I bet you thought I would say it tastes like chicken…
PZ Myers says
Yep, same article. Both pictures are there in greater glory…I just liked them both.
Moment of Science says
That is a magnificient Crown Gall! Agrobacterium is such an amazing orgnanism, it had to be intelligently designed it just had to… What good would a Ti plasmid be be without every one of the proteins produced by the vir genes? If you take out one protein the whole system fails, it must have been constructed as an entire biochemical pathway all put in place at once. Like a molecular machine, if you will.
I kid, I kid.
But seriously, where the heck did that thing come from?
I’m going to have to go with some kind of viral horizontal gene transfer to bacteria myself.
Krauze says
Hi PZ,
You said that non-Metazoan entries would get a “honored category of their own”. Will they appear in a separate post?
BruceH says
Hey, PZ,
Looks like you have room for one more.
Andre says
Here’s my own late, partially relevant entry about the connection between a jellyfish and biophysics via. green fluorescent protein:
http://biocurious.com/how-a-jelly-fish-shows-us-the-world-of-the-cell