
Why is the microbiome important in some animals but not others? - theafh
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-is-the-microbiome-important-in-some-animals-but-not-others-20200414/
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mmastrac
Since the headline is somewhat click-baity, the answer to "here's what it
tells us":

Caterpillars, dragonflies, certain ants and other animals provide a way to
investigate the potential disadvantages of long-lasting symbiotic
relationships with live-in microbes; such disadvantages tend to be difficult
to measure and test.

A microbiome might theoretically enable the caterpillars to manufacture
additional important nutrients or go after more nutrient-dense vegetation, but
the insects can make up for quality with quantity.

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dang
I've replaced the article title with the HTML doc title. Maybe that's less
baity, although it doesn't answer the question.

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S_A_P
Quanta seems to have a particularly bad habit of implying a conclusion in the
title and then not really getting to said conclusion in the article.

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twic
I can't remember the last time i saw a Quanta article here that wasn't
completely vacuous. The headlines are great, though! Maybe they should get the
headline writers to write the articles?

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ABeeSea
I liked their recent article on the Langlands program.

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/amazing-math-bridge-
extended-...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/amazing-math-bridge-extended-
beyond-fermats-last-theorem-20200406/)

~~~
twic
The illustration there is great. But i think the article is pretty vacuous: it
tells you that there is this bridge, but it doesn't explain what the bridge
is. Which is understandable, because that's very complicated and deep, and
this is a short article for a general audience.

Take the explanation of automorphic forms:

"On the other side of the bridge live objects called automorphic forms, which
are akin to highly symmetric colorings of certain tilings. In the cases Wiles
studied, the tiling might be something along the lines of M.C. Escher’s famous
tessellations of a disk with fish or angels and devils that get smaller near
the boundary. In the broader Langlands universe, the tiling might instead fill
a three-dimensional ball or some other higher-dimensional space."

Having read that, do you now actually know anything about automorphic forms?
No. It goes on:

"Namely, for both Diophantine equations and automorphic forms, there’s a
natural way to generate an infinite sequence of numbers. [...] And for the
kind of automorphic form that appears in the Langlands correspondence, you can
compute an infinite list of numbers analogous to quantum energy levels."

What on earth does that mean?

This might well be the projection of the truth onto the low-dimensional space
of ordinary language, but it ends up being word salad.

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ABeeSea
The idea of automorphic forms as analogous to symmetric colorings of a
tesselation that shrinks on the boundary is a way more intuitive description
than the mathematical definition of automorphic forms. So yes, I do feel like
I know more about them from that definition versus the definition of
invariance under subgroup action.

And for the second quote, I took it to mean that the subset of automorphic
forms that map to Diophantine equations can be used to generate an infinite
sequence that maps to quantum energy levels which I believe means maps to the
number of electrons in the orbit of the nucleus (2, 8, 18,...) etc.

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adelHBN
Although there are exceptions to this quote from Quanta, what I concluded is
that I should continue eating burgers and steak! "Strictly herbivorous tree-
dwelling ants were more likely to have an abundant microbiome, perhaps to make
up for their protein-deficient diet; omnivorous and carnivorous ground-
dwelling ants consumed more balanced meals and had negligible amounts of
bacteria in their gut."

~~~
__s
So, in case you aren't being facetious,

1\. different species foster different microbiomes, you're better off looking
at studies of actual human dietary impact on gut bacteria:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6478664](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6478664)

2\. gut bacteria isn't necessarily bad (but having no gut bacteria _is_ bad)

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JoshTko
TLDR Scientists still don't understand exactly what gut microbiome do for
animals and insects and why some are a lot more diverse than others.

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ASalazarMX
Super TL;DR: We don't know yet

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awinter-py
shield bugs have an entire organ, distinct from the gut, that hosts bacteria
which help them attack plants

[https://aem.asm.org/content/78/8/2648](https://aem.asm.org/content/78/8/2648)

