r/interestingasfuck 26d ago

This pixelated leaf I found /r/ALL

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96k Upvotes

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724

u/dick-nipples 26d ago

It looks like a mosaic virus

119

u/TotoroZoo 26d ago

TIL. Thanks!

30

u/branzalia 26d ago

Just a side note about plant viruses but there is something called the tulip breaking virus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_breaking_virus

It created bizarre coloration and some of the most valuable tulips during the "Tulip Craze" in Holland but it wasn't passed on like the other coloration patterns via genetics. While they didn't understand genes at the time they did know about passing on of characteristics for breeding purposes but these patterns didn't get passed on like other traits.

3

u/Perle1234 26d ago

That was really interesting. I came down here to figure out how that leaf got like that and went to class lol.

255

u/poopellar 26d ago

So this is what the Japanese men are suffering from.

25

u/yb4zombeez 26d ago

I don't get it...

22

u/[deleted] 26d ago

[deleted]

11

u/LovableContrarian 26d ago

It says a lot about you that you could have said Japanese porn, but you thought of hentai instead.

0

u/jxjcc 26d ago

Isn't that a pretty familiar term for most well-rounded redditors? Like this isn't 1996, anyone that's used pornhub more than once knows what hentai is.

2

u/LovableContrarian 26d ago

Yeah, we all know what hentai is. That wasn't my point.

1

u/yb4zombeez 26d ago

Oh hahahaha NOW I get it!

And trust me I watch too much hentai if anything...

35

u/fuckfuckfuckSHIT 26d ago

I just wanted to say I laughed out loud for a good 30 seconds at your comment, so thank you.

-9

u/reedless 26d ago

I want to upvote this but it has 69 upvotes.....

-1

u/ListlessSoul 26d ago

You beat me to it, great minds think alike

7

u/purvel 26d ago

I remember reading about mosaic viruses, but I never saw pictures of it. The name makes total sense now.

7

u/eatmyshorzz 26d ago

are you active in r/whatplantisthis ? If you aren't, you should be!

EDIT: typo

28

u/Ice_cold_07 26d ago

It's been a pleasure, op. We are no longer able to see you in 4k hdr.

2

u/backtolurk 26d ago

There was a time I litterally imagined what was on the screen. If your brain can build a pair of nipples, you can see a pair of nipples.

25

u/throwaway_0122 26d ago

I did not realize plants could get viruses

61

u/6bubbles 26d ago

They can! Its surprising how many ways plants can get sick, honestly.

59

u/Calypsosin 26d ago

Growing fruits and veggies is like a roulette wheel of pests, disease, and biblical waterfall.

17

u/ChicknPenis 26d ago

My cucumbers get this disease every damn year. Really hurts my yields.

7

u/Calypsosin 26d ago

My cukes don't get mosaic, but my tomatoes tend to. My tomatoes just don't fruit, actually, because it quickly reaches 90+, so the pollen just dies in the bud.

My cukes did OK this year, but lack of rain and pests did them in. I was treating this years garden as sort of a 'off' year, where I just put a few things out and barely paid attention to them unless needed.

Next year will be more vigilant on my part :p

8

u/MushroomStand9 26d ago

I've not heard of high temperatures causing tomato pollen to die in the bud. Tomatoes love the heat from what I understand. What causes fruiting for tomatoes (other than nutrients) is having warm nights. The redness of tomatoes comes later from the heat of the sun. Which is why if you take an under ripe tomato and keep it in the sun for a day or two it will be a deeper red. Not a better flavor but a better color at least. I wonder if your soil conditions are right for them. Are they getting enough nutrients to fruit? I've just never heard of someone not being able to grow them if they live in a zone where it is possible to grow them. Im genuinely confused.

5

u/Calypsosin 26d ago

They get proper nutrients, I amend and test my soil, my water is good from the well.

I’ve grown for over a decade. East Texas. It’s super humid and hot during the summer… with proper shading and water intake, they will fruit. But they absolutely will refuse to fruit with 95+ temps. I’ve seen it happen time and again. Without shading they biologically refuse to pollinate at high temps.

Heat resistant varieties can do better, for sure, but I don’t like any of those varieties :P

6

u/MushroomStand9 26d ago

Ohhhh okay. This makes a lot more sense, I don't think I realized after a certain temp they would need cover. I imagine the humidity also plays a huge role for you too being from TX.

Are the heat resistant varieties less flavorful like how store tomatoes have been bred in such a disease hardy way the flavor is basically gone? Is that why you don't like them?

6

u/Calypsosin 26d ago

Yeah, it's mostly a flavor/texture deal for me. I hate store-bought tomatoes here. Grew up thinking I just hated tomatoes in their raw form, until I visited Italy and discovered holy hell, tomatoes can taste amazing?! So I started growing them more at home. They are a huge pain in the ass here, but they absolutely can grow. They are just needy and picky, and the climate here isn't something they really like without adjustments!

My friends live further out in the country and they grow multiple long rows of slicing and paste tomatoes like roma, and they get great results. We figure they place their tomatoes in an ideal location regarding sun, because my yard garden spot gets like 14+ hours of sun a day, which is normally awesome, but when the heat index is like 115 F, nature just starts to revolt honestly, haha.

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u/ReaperX24 26d ago

That's strange, summer reaches insane levels of heat and humidity where I'm from and tomatoes grow just fine without the need for shading. Today it was 41c (105f) and 50% humidity during the day, and that's not even that bad by our standards.

Perhaps it depends on the strain? Or other factors could possibly be in play.

3

u/Calypsosin 26d ago

Could be. Our resting humidity is closer to 80% generally. It's like a god damn temperate swamp half the year.

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u/CarbonGod 26d ago

I got it this year, but holy hell did I have WAY too many. Of course, I had 8-10 plants. That might have helped.

1

u/PreviousFriendship85 26d ago

try polyculture & guild planting

9

u/Snotpotato 26d ago

I'm trying to help my ficus, Meg, get over something right now :(

4

u/6bubbles 26d ago

Good luck, Meg!

2

u/gmano 26d ago

Especially given that plants appear to be totally immune to cancer.

5

u/StainedTeabag 26d ago

You haven't looked hard enough.

3

u/ImAOneTrackLover 26d ago

Define "immune"? Cancer isn't some contagious virus or bacteria.

1

u/gmano 26d ago

Metastatic cancer is very much like a parasite or bacteria.

1

u/horsegrenadesexpants 26d ago

You should check out agrobacterium.

3

u/schwiftshop 26d ago

what are galls and burls?

3

u/gmano 26d ago

Gall: a protective cyst the tree forms around an insect egg. Cysts are not at all like metastatic tumors.

Burls: tissue growth misalignment due to trauma, like a scar on an animal. Scars are not cancers.

21

u/StupidityHurts 26d ago

They like pretty much every other living thing can be infected with all the usual stuff.

Fungi, viruses, bacteria, and parasites.

11

u/Dragonsandman 26d ago

Viruses that infect bacteria have some potential for medical applications, particularly for potentially dealing with drug-resistant pathogenic bacteria. They're not a silver bullet solution, but there's been quite a lot of research that's been conducted on using bacteriophages in this manner, particularly in Georgia (the country) and in Russia.

12

u/StupidityHurts 26d ago

Yea Bacteriophage research has been around for ages actually

4

u/uberguby 26d ago

Also, if anybody hasn't seen a bacteriophage before, they are one of the coolest
microscopic (nanoscopic?) structures in nature. I feel like in the context of "anti-bacterial research" we might get the impression that the "walking syringe with payload" structure is artificial, but that just happened, out there in the world.

1

u/IdoNOThateNEVER 26d ago

cancer too.

3

u/Broken_Infinity 26d ago

Oh yeah. RNA viruses usually.

2

u/2drawnonward5 26d ago

It's alliiiiiive!!! So it can get infected!

2

u/Cepinari 26d ago

The Tobacco Mosaic Virus is how we discovered viruses in the first place!

1

u/throwaway_0122 26d ago

That is amazingly cool

3

u/antiduh 26d ago

No Netscape Navigator for you now, op.

3

u/DontJudgeMeDammit 26d ago

Even the plants are going through a pandemic 😢😷

2

u/X_gamergirl_xX 26d ago

I had this on a batch of my squash/zucchini one year! Super interesting tbh

2

u/mountainphilic 26d ago

Thanks to that rabbit hole, I learned my zucchini seem to have cucumber mosaic virus or something similar.

2

u/Baricuda 26d ago

The structure of the virus is really cool too! While you might think of a virus having the shape of a polyhedron with landing legs, plant viruses look very different! For instance the mosaic virus looks like a long spindly rod that has a shell wrapped around a tightly helixed virus core!

1

u/Penis-Envys 26d ago

Must be Japanese

1

u/pzk550 26d ago

You have to be the biggest karma fisherman on Reddit

1

u/maepasta2017 26d ago

I like learning new stuff, thanks dick-nipples.