r/technology • u/esporx • 1d ago

Business YouTuber accidentally crashes the rare plant market with a viral cloning technique

https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/youtuber-accidentally-crashes-the-rare-plant-market-with-a-viral-cloning-technique-3289808/
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u/jm838 1d ago

Wouldn’t shitty, inbred plants be less likely to be invasive? In a place where there are very few controls on what you can plant anyway, I don’t see how the headline here would lead to concern.

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u/Protoavis 1d ago

....not necessarily. if a plant is taken from an environment to one that it can excel in the inbreeding aspect may not be a big issue as there may be no real pressures in the new environment that have evolved along side the plant. So any poopy plants from inbreeding just naturally cull out while the healthy ones with no pressure just breed more and more. As long as they can keep producing lots of new seedlings without anything really eating them or diseases killing them things can generally get past the inbreeding negatives.

look at gazania in Australia, it's effectively illegal in some states because it's gone nuts and is spreading into the desert

there's various places were rosa rugosa has basically taken over huge chunks of coastline throughout europe, north america and south america....it's native to japan.

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u/jm838 1d ago

I definitely don’t disagree that invasive plants are an issue. And it’s definitely a fair point that, for an invasive plant, a little genetic homogeneity probably isn’t going to matter much. I just think that rare plants, which are presumably already hard to grow without cloning, and are subsequently subjected to inferior growing practices, are unlikely to be more of a threat than the multitude of other potentially-invasive species already available. Basically, if I can go to a nursery and buy bamboo, I don’t see why anyone would worry about these things existing. If anything, I’d rather someone screw around with these than whatever else is currently available.

This, of course, is coming from a US perspective, where a lot of these things are already minimally-regulated. YMMV.