Jophiel wrote:
Literally you don't know that from a photo. In the cucumber picture you can't tell if the leaf is breaking through the cucumber skin or growing off the outside of the cucumber. Not that either situation is normal but you can't just take every botanical oddity and say "Radiation!!"
This.
If I learned nothing else from genetics it was that plants are weird. Just one example from wikiville:
Quote:
Polyploidy is pervasive in plants and some estimates suggest that 30–80% of living plant species are polyploid, and many lineages show evidence of ancient polyploidy (paleopolyploidy) in their genomes.[17][18][19] Huge explosions in angiosperm species diversity appear to have coincided with the timing of ancient genome duplications shared by many species.[20] It has been established that 15% of angiosperm and 31% of fern speciation events are accompanied by ploidy increase.[21] Polyploid plants can arise spontaneously in nature by several mechanisms, including meiotic or mitotic failures, and fusion of unreduced (2n) gametes.[22] Both autopolyploids (e.g. potato [23]) and allopolyploids (e.g. canola, wheat, cotton) can be found among both wild and domesticated plant species.
In other words they like to double their genes just for the fun of it. Creating new "species" simply because it got too cold outside, or some cow looked at them wrong, or something. A 5n human with 3 extra copies of chromosome 15 would self-abort. With a plant, it gets crossed with a 3n individual, and before you know there's little mutants popping up all over your garden.
We won't even get started on grasses, little bastards.
Anyway, I was rambling about something? Oh yeah, plants do that kind of stuff all the time. They just filter those kinds of things out before they get to market because no one is going to buy a weird looking apple no matter how safe it is. Not to say radiation isn't bad or anything, but I suspect all the typical weird plants are just getting noticed now.
Olorinus the Ludicrous wrote:
I personally thought this was the more appropriate Final Fantasy plant-monster reference:
Me too.