Ask HN: How to start a plant-based evolutionary simulation?
I'm working on an idea to simulate an ecosystem starting with plants, focusing on evolution through natural selection. Before moving on to animals, I want to explore how plants evolve under different environmental pressures. What are some key factors or mechanics that could make this simulation more realistic? I'd appreciate any thoughts or advice on how to approach this from a technical and evolutionary perspective.
Check out ESA's sci-hub or their website. They've done extensive research on this for their biology lab module on the ISS.
Edit: Oh they rebranded it to science hub [1] I think, the former sci hub is now only for copernicus data as it seems. [2]. Their code is now rebranded as ESSR [3]
As solardev explains in a sibling comment, a realistic model of plants is very complicated. My recommendation is to start programming a toy model, were the fake plants are very simplified. Something like: height, water, sugar, chlorophyll.
I prefer simulations of fake animals because they move and you get nice animations in the screen.
Edit: Hey OP, sorry if this is all stuff you already know! On second reading, your post was a little ambiguous in that it wasn't clear if you were entering the world of plants for the first time or maybe you were already well versed in plant bio and just wanted to talk about the software aspect. If that's the case, my bad, please ignore the following :)
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There are so many! Plants have an incredibly rich life, and have evolved over millions years to survive in all sorts of niches. A random brainstorm of factors that they have to deal with:
- Sunlight
- Water
- CO2/oxygen/other gases
- Soil nutrients
- Predation
- Symbionts (fungi, bacteria, insects, animals)
- Wildfire adaptations
- Saltwater adaptations
- Low-water adaptations (learning to drink fog, or ambient air moisture, or seawater, or desert root systems, thick leaves, etc.)
- Chlorophyll adaptations (or lack thereof, especially): some plants survive by borrowing/stealing nutrients from their neighbors or symbionts instead of producing their own sugars
- Touch-sensitivity (like the venus flytrap or the "sensitive plant" (mimosa pudica))
- Communications via airborne pheromones, mycorrhizal networks, insect/bird carriers, wind, etc.
- Reproduction: everything from sexual to clonal to self-pollinating and probably others I've never even heard of. And their "dating" strategies are equally fascinating, sometimes depending on chance, or fire, or animals, or just widespread, well, uh, gamete spreading
- Morphology: Plants usually have some combination of roots, stems, and fruits, and leaves, but how they look and function can vary drastically from a leafy plant to something like a cactus. They get modified a lot ("forked", if you will), but you can still see their origins if you look carefully
- Genetics and breeding
- Sensory systems (tracking sunlight, touch, water, gravity/up/down, etc.)
- Defense and warfare (against predation, other plants, fire, etc.), often chemical but sometimes mechanical
- Friendships and lures (kinda like their symbioses, but with a focus on "how" more than "what/who" they partner with, e.g. exchanging food with fungi or providing shelter for birds or luring in certain insects instead of others, etc.)
In some ways, they are even more fascinating than animals, because they had to evolve all of these survival strategies despite not being motile (not being able to move themselves, generally speaking) and being at the mercy of environmental conditions around them.
There's sooooo much more to their lives, you could easily spend several careers studying them. Just pick up any college-level intro to botany textbook to learn some of the basics. IANA botanist, just someone who casually (and poorly) studied them in college. Wish I paid more attention! You could easily start with plants and never even get to animals, just keep diving into more and more detail on some super tiny part of an edge of a leaf...
If this is of strong enough interest to you, maybe see if there's a grad program somewhere that's specifically about the quantitative analysis of plant evolution? There's at least a journal about it... https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/quantitative-plant-b...
It was a pretty interdisciplinary program combining general climate science, a tiny bit of botany, some renewables engineering, statistics, environmental education, etc. It was awesome, but never led to any job opportunities. Web dev was what paid the bills.
Edit: Oh they rebranded it to science hub [1] I think, the former sci hub is now only for copernicus data as it seems. [2]. Their code is now rebranded as ESSR [3]
[1] https://sciencehub.esa.int/
[2] https://scihub.copernicus.eu/
[3] https://essr.esa.int/
I prefer simulations of fake animals because they move and you get nice animations in the screen.
-----
There are so many! Plants have an incredibly rich life, and have evolved over millions years to survive in all sorts of niches. A random brainstorm of factors that they have to deal with:
- Sunlight
- Water
- CO2/oxygen/other gases
- Soil nutrients
- Predation
- Symbionts (fungi, bacteria, insects, animals)
- Wildfire adaptations
- Saltwater adaptations
- Low-water adaptations (learning to drink fog, or ambient air moisture, or seawater, or desert root systems, thick leaves, etc.)
- Chlorophyll adaptations (or lack thereof, especially): some plants survive by borrowing/stealing nutrients from their neighbors or symbionts instead of producing their own sugars
- Touch-sensitivity (like the venus flytrap or the "sensitive plant" (mimosa pudica))
- Communications via airborne pheromones, mycorrhizal networks, insect/bird carriers, wind, etc.
- Reproduction: everything from sexual to clonal to self-pollinating and probably others I've never even heard of. And their "dating" strategies are equally fascinating, sometimes depending on chance, or fire, or animals, or just widespread, well, uh, gamete spreading
- Morphology: Plants usually have some combination of roots, stems, and fruits, and leaves, but how they look and function can vary drastically from a leafy plant to something like a cactus. They get modified a lot ("forked", if you will), but you can still see their origins if you look carefully
- Genetics and breeding
- Sensory systems (tracking sunlight, touch, water, gravity/up/down, etc.)
- Defense and warfare (against predation, other plants, fire, etc.), often chemical but sometimes mechanical
- Friendships and lures (kinda like their symbioses, but with a focus on "how" more than "what/who" they partner with, e.g. exchanging food with fungi or providing shelter for birds or luring in certain insects instead of others, etc.)
In some ways, they are even more fascinating than animals, because they had to evolve all of these survival strategies despite not being motile (not being able to move themselves, generally speaking) and being at the mercy of environmental conditions around them.
There's sooooo much more to their lives, you could easily spend several careers studying them. Just pick up any college-level intro to botany textbook to learn some of the basics. IANA botanist, just someone who casually (and poorly) studied them in college. Wish I paid more attention! You could easily start with plants and never even get to animals, just keep diving into more and more detail on some super tiny part of an edge of a leaf...
If this is of strong enough interest to you, maybe see if there's a grad program somewhere that's specifically about the quantitative analysis of plant evolution? There's at least a journal about it... https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/quantitative-plant-b...
It was a pretty interdisciplinary program combining general climate science, a tiny bit of botany, some renewables engineering, statistics, environmental education, etc. It was awesome, but never led to any job opportunities. Web dev was what paid the bills.