@Piss_Ant@Rogue_Koala Okay, now I need to know. What is the difference between algae and plants? I strive to learn something new as often as possible, even if the information will be mostly useless to me (unless I need to argue about algae in the future).
Plants are the dominate photosynthesizer on land, so we are the most familiar with them. They all belong to the same group of organisms, which evolved from green algae, and is likely closely related to red algae.
So plants are one group of organisms by relatedness. Algae is a larger category of organisms that encompasses all photosynthetic organisms, no matter where they are on the tree of life.
"Officially" (because the morons run the world) plants are not algae. But this is just an arbitrary rule, that past a certain point on that branch of the tree of life, we don't call them algae anymore because they are too "complex"
@Fullycaffeinated@Rogue_Koala Plants share a common ancestor with green algae (They evolved from a group of green algae). There are many, many groups of algae though, that are not closely related to plants. Brown algae are no more closely related to plants than we are. One could argue their plastid is closely related to greens, but we actually aren't sure of that anymore.
@Fullycaffeinated@Rogue_Koala but algae would be some of the oldest living organisms, because we count cyanobacteria as algae. And red algae are some of the oldest eukaryotes. Also, sex likely evolved in red algae.
@Fullycaffeinated@Rogue_Koala no omg i love talking about algae. I even like when I go to gardens or parks and there is information about the algae there, it may have tons of mistakes but it often still conveys something interesting and meaningful. I just hate that article so much lol. I am convinced someone wrote that specifically to annoy me. Maybe this "conservationist" learned about seaweed from ChatGPT.
@Fullycaffeinated@Rogue_Koala Generally, no. Vascular marine and aquatic plants evolved from terrestrial ancestors. For other aquatic plants, I have no idea. Aquatic algae like Chara would be easily confused with a plant, and it is indeed very closely related to plants.
@Piss_Ant@Rogue_Koala If you weren't so far away, I would have you over for a long chat about algae. I was that student who would go to my professors with one question and end up staying an hour.
Can you introduce them to the two domain theory of life? Might be more motivating to know that archea may be the root of the eukaryotic branch while bacteria are the other...