Topic: Tomato turn vegeterians into cannibals. (Read 1094 times)

Yes, I was a vegetarian until I have eaten one tomato, after that I have started to eat my nails and then also to bite the interior of my mouth eating little pieces of myself - in fact I had become truly a cannibal.

What the Earth would look like
if all the ice melted


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbiRNT_gWUQ

It is hard to imagine eating any of that stuff from fast food restaurants without tomato sauce. The consumption of tomatoes has increased along with the increase in consumption of fast food.

In my life, I haven't eaten even single tomato. For me it looks and smells disgusting. When I was kicked, I only tried ketchup from tomatoes and didn't liked it's taste.
I don't know how serious this scientific research, but I will continue to avoid tomatoes.

tomatoes have gotta be one of the most worthless foods out there. they don't taste of much but people stick them in everywhere.

maybe this will scare chefs into laying off them.

It seems to me that this is already going over all the limits of common sense. To lead such a mechanism will be used against caterpillars, it is possible that it will be applied to larger scales for other species.

The last point really depends on the scope at which you consider the consequences. Animal agriculture has contributed to increased CO2 emissions and thus global warming. Simultaneously it has caused a lot of suffering for animals. As a result, there is a massive amount of research and development going on that seeks to alleviate these symptoms, which will ultimately make the world a better place once ripe. People will be able to eat meat without having to put animals through shit. Since the meat will be lab-created, it will also be possible to make it healthier and tastier at the same time.

While I do disagree with the animal abuse that goes into "creating" most of the meat on earth, I do think that it helped a lot of people survive. It's easier to transport large amounts of meats than to transport orders of magnitude more vegetables and fruits. Transports are still extremely expensive after all, and also contribute largely to the CO2 emissions.
 
Furthermore, traditional agriculture benefits the environment, rather than harming it. This is due to the animals essentially creating fertile soil in which plant life, critters and rodents and whatnot can thrive. This also creates a sustainable environment for birds, reptiles and other animals.
Which is also why I not only don't see any moral issues with eating meat that was properly farm raised, but actually consider it as beneficial.

The non-plus ultra will be raising a few animals that provide all these benefits, while providing the cells needed to raise meat in labs (without hurting the animals!). We are definitely getting there, and it's just a matter of public awareness and funding as to when we will reach that point.

i never knew this was possible. thank you.

this is food-chain. some eat some eaten.

caterpillars are predatory animals. it is true.

Normally, most of the plants are capable of defending themselves against the pests (up to a certain limit). But the indiscriminate usage of chemical pesticides has reduced this "natural immunity" of the pants. This is very similar to the case in humans, where the over-prescription of antibiotics have reduced the immunity of the body against common viruses.

Ahahaha, just came back to the thread to look for comment like this. 

I hope tomatoes can turn criminals into vegetables. That should reduce hunger as well as free up space in prisons.


It need not be GMO. Plants are very capable of brewing toxins when needed and we've only just begun to find out how they communicate with each others. Heck, I've even seen a clip of heirloom corn calling on nematodes to destroy pests.

As for tomatoes, they are nightshades, not surprised out of all crops that it was the first to be seen doing this.

It certainly doesn't repeatedly breed them purely for the purpose of killing them later, killing billions and billions of animals over many years, no.  Do you think the population of cows was so high before humans started breeding them en masse, cutting down huge parts of the Amazon rainforest just for pasture?
Plant life would still exist, because plants take energy from the Sun, and the Sun is not alive.  I see your point though.
Yes, but we live in the real world, so we should be as efficient and rational as possible while still being alive.  I understand that people can say "I just like meat", but the damage that animal agriculture causes far outweighs any petty pleasure that people can draw from it.

I'm not so sure about that. There are numerous studies that indicate that trees and other plants warn each other of intruders through emission of chemicals into the air and/or through root networks. Plants/trees that have not yet been befallen by insects or other intruders then actually ramp up their defenses and produces chemicals and whatnot to defend themselves.
Wouldn't be surprised if the tomato stuff here was of similar nature. Humans have a tendency to vastly overestimate their own capabilities in relation to other stuff in the universe. There's really nothing special about us though.

I would love to say this is animal nature, but the tomatoes aren't making the caterpillars eat it.
The caterpillars are the ones that decided hey I would rather eat you bud than have more of this tomato and thus spilled the ketchup in a metaphorical sense.
But i'm going to go with GMO tomato messed with them somehow, modifying the amount of meJa for the experiment, although that said it is proven now that the caterpillars do eventually eat each other in the end so science.

Anything is possible, if you consume the carcinogenic GMO tomato from the United States. But the OP is not very clear which type of tomato was used for the research. I assume that it was GMO tomato.

what this treads?

Does tomato turn cannibals into vegetables?     

Plowing kill animals too.

If the natural food-chain was efficient, no life would exist whatsoever. After all, it takes up energy to even create a creature capable of consuming another. In terms of efficiency we'd be better off with nothing. I'm glad that the universe doesn't behave that way and am hoping that lab grown meat will make huge progress in the very near future. Until then I'll keep looking out for farm-raised meat and keep eating it.


Also, lol at tomato propaganda driving insects insane.

A the end of the way, living things eat other ones. So there must exist a balance. 

Note - even if plants are intelligent, vegetarianism still makes perfect sense.

Why, you ask?  Because by eating a cow/pig/chicken, you're eating something which ate plants and also used energy in their lives.  So you're eating far, far more plants indirectly than you would be by just eating the plants.

Of course there's also the fact carbon emissions would decrease if people didn't pointlessly breed >1 billion cows.  There wouldn't naturally be so many, and there would be plants grown in those spaces instead.

The natural food chain is inefficient, but that doesn't matter to the individual animal who eats another animal, because they will take any food source that they can get.  Humans on the other hand are perfectly capable of living on plants and are not bound by instinct.  It makes no sense to deliberately take the choice of making all your lives extremely inefficient and wasting resources.  It especially confuses me when people take steps like shortening showers to save water, but ignore the effects of animal agriculture.

Plants are alive right? So they are also assasins, they must stop these crimes.

This is indeed very funny, I know some vegetarians and they are definitely not acting like the zombies in the walking dead, You should present some proof with what you are saying, A detailed research from a credited laboratory will help us believe what you are saying because i dont believe a word of it.

very stupid conspiracy theory, I eat vegetables every day, and i dont eat flesh, i am not a zombie lol

The world is not black and white. Those caterpillars have to eat to stay alive, the plants need to survive too. Same with cannibalism in humans. Even in cultures where it is frowned upon, it becomes a last resort during times of need. War for example, has been known to force citizens of besieged cities to eat each other. Though I suppose they'll try to eat enemies first if they can.

Cannibals not only benefit the plant by eating herbivores, but cannibals also don’t have as much appetite for plant material, presumably because they’re already full from eating other caterpillars.”

some Many insects are known to become cannibalistic when the going gets tough,” said biologist John Orrock, author of a new study on the phenomenon published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

“It often starts with one caterpillar biting another one in the rear, which then oozes. And it goes downhill from there.

“At the end of the day, somebody gets eaten.”

Its believed a chemical called methyl jasmonate is responsible for turning caterpillars into cannibals.

To test the effect of this substance, Orrock and his team sprayed it on leaves and found that caterpillars who were exposed to it were more likely to chow down on their chums.

They also found that methyl jasmonate worked like a “chemical scream” by alerting other plants so they could produce their own defences.

Scientists simulated a protective response to plant pests by tomatoes, which causes them to produce a chemical that turns their taste sour.

They found that the higher the concentration of the organic compound, the faster the caterpillars would begin to consume their comrades.

The result demonstrates a previously unknown effect of plants' defensive mechanisms, say the researchers

Plants truly are fascinating. We just think they're some sort of passive organisms but because they can't move, they have resorted to chemical signalling to communicate with each other. It seems most plants do it, the moment they're leaves are eaten, they send out an alarm. It seems they can even differentiate insect bite from other manners of damage.

Go look up passionflower vs butterfly on Google, it's a very interesting sort of "cold war" between the two.

But is it the tomatoes who are the villains in this story, or the caterpillars? The tomatoes can't actually force the caterpillars to eat each other, and the caterpillars can actually find food elsewhere. The topic of cannibalism, in any species, is quite fascinating as we as humans often claim that it is something so barbaric that we would never be able to do such a thing. But history has proven multiple times that during certain circumstanses humans are capable to do horrible things. In that senario we are the caterpillars and the world; a tomato.

I knew it, those bloody things are evil! *dips fries in ketchup*

Not surprising though. Plants are more clever than we give them credit for. Caffeine for example, have different effect depending on who ingested it. Pests tend to get poisoned when they eat the leaves and fruits while pollinators get a buzz, helping them remember the location of the plant.