Comments

  1. 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?

  2. 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.

  3. wcamps says

    Romanesco cabbage tastes very close to cauliflower. I bet you thought I would say it tastes like chicken…

  4. 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.

  5. says

    Hi PZ,

    You said that non-Metazoan entries would get a “honored category of their own”. Will they appear in a separate post?