A Plant That Thrives When Used as a Toilet | Hacker News Reader

A Plant That Thrives When Used as a Toilet

nytimes.com

43 pointsbbg11 comments

There are few things plants like more than animal and human waste. I did an experiment in highschool about the filtering ability of native plant species. This was Florida in the mid-nineties. SE Water management district gave me a and a few biologists a 2 acre plot of land near the waste water processing plant and let me have at it. Using treated grey water, a bog was started at one end with rows and rows of sawgrass. The water that made it to the end was crystal clear.

After the experiments were done and went off to college, to pursue CS of all things. The district sold the land to developers who built yet another unneeded warehouse/stripmall in South Florida.

Later on the state and Fed went on to a billion dollar buying spree of tracts of land through the middle of the state. Those experiments are still continuing there 10 years after I published my results.

It would be awesome if someone could engineer houseplants like these, except on steroids, so they could handle larger loads more quickly.

Why can't the whole house clean itself? Nature manages it, somehow. There could be ants from the pharmacy to replace hovering and so on ;-)

An maybe not. My SO has too keen a sense of smell for that to work around our house.

It's called a lemon tree, and used to be a standard sight in just about every Australian backyard

Is that why the song says "the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat"?

Showing your age there...

I learned the song when I was just a lad of ten.

“Form follows function,” Dr. Moran said. N. lowii’s bowls “even look like toilets,” he added, “though we were too polite to say that in the paper.”

Take note, students! There's no hope of those journal articles becoming less boring anytime soon. The writing process kills even modest attempts at on-topic humor...

I find it somehow cool that there are people who have studied poop-eating plants for 20 years. Are there really 20 years worth of knowledge there?

Yeah, but it's all crap. :D We're only just discovering the contributions of plants like this, usually when they disappear, eg mangrove forests in Florida.

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