Talk:Mutualism (biology)

message: Can this be merged into Biological interaction?  Use Talk:Biological interaction to discuss.  Jmeppley 19:01, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree, see Talk:Commensalism Jmeppley 16:43, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Definitely worthy of its own article. Mutualism and symbiosis overlap but neither is a form of the other. Richard001 07:32, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  merge with [[biological interaction]] ? 

message: It sucks last paragraph from the article that read "also, those trees with the ants that protect it.". It is clearly half a sentence and poorly worded. However if anyone does know what "those trees with the ants that protect them" are then it does imho deserve a mention in the article. Thryduulf 15:52, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rm of paragraph 

message: would making refrences to peter kropotkins book mutual aid: a factor in evolution be appropriate? Im thinking of making it a subsection or atleast paying tribute to it as one of the first scientific addings of the concept mutual aid to darwinian evolution.
: I strongly concur.  His work might seem a tad dated now, but he was very likely the pioneer of this branch of ecology/biology.  --Smilo Don 00:36, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'd love to agree. It was a really popular work in the early part of the 20th century. Perhaps because noone could think of a model which would explain the evolution of interspecific cooperation in contexts like the prisoner's dilemma, people went on seeing competitive models like the survival of the fittest as the default for nature despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. But all of this is original research unless we find some work that talks about it.Brinerustle (talk) 14:02, 29 December 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:  Is there any reason why this still haven't been added? Mutual Aid really is one of the first books on this subject. --Rastapunk (talk) 15:58, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:  It seems not; feel free to add something, citing suitable secondary sources (i.e. not just Kropotkin, but what biologists wrote about his mutual aid ideas). Good luck! Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:10, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Peter Kropotkin 

message: We seem to have a problem with cats - there is no :Category:Mutualism, but some non-symbiotic interactions are being added there. For example pollination is generally not symbiotic. I don't think mutualism itself should be in the symbiosis category anymore than symbiosis should be in the mutualism category, though it might help as a navigation aid. Richard001 05:07, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Category 

message: There should be a section about the mutual symbiotic relationship between plants and animals (including human beings).  Plants use the solids, liquids and gases (CO2) we excrete and we use the oxygen and food provided by plants.  We need to grow more plants to feed an ever growing population, and to clean up our wastes...Friendlyinnovators (talk) 17:34, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: To grow more plants for food would basically require cutting down more forests, which would kind of go against the 'cleaning up our wastes' thing. We might also consider why populations are so high in the first place, i.e. availability of food. Richard001 (talk) 02:05, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

text: Hydroponics enables the growth of plants using much less space and much less water than conventional methods.  Oceans cover over 70% of the earth's surface and could be used to grow algae, which can be converted to biofuel and food.  Reducing population is not a solution.  I'm not willing to offer, are you?  We need to use creativity to solve problems.Friendlyinnovators (talk) 16:00, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: There is no long term solution that doesn't involve stopping population growth. Your ideas are unrealistic and don't address the source of the problem. But this has gotten completely off topic, so let's take it elsewhere if you wish to continue. Richard001 (talk) 07:44, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plants & Animals 

message: If "Mutualism is a biological interaction between individuals of two different species, where both individuals derive a fitness benefit", and  "symbiotic" is a sub-classification within "mutualism", how can "parasitic" be a sub-classification within symbiosis, as written on the Wikipedia "Symbiosis" page?  Commensalism is also listed as a type of symbiosis on the "Symbiosis" page, being defined as "a kind of relationship between two organisms where one benefits and the other is not significantly harmed or helped".  If these other definitions are correct, then the definition of "mutualism" must be incorrect.  
Are there, in fact, no universally accepted definitions?  Is this a matter of different schools of biology having their own definitions?  Can a coherent set of working definitions not be formulated?    
[This note has been added to both the "Mutualism" and "Symbiosis" Talk pages.]  Heavenlyblue (talk) 23:50, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarification of Definitions 

message: Maybe we should change "without which we would not be able to digest food efficiently" to "without which we are not be able to digest food efficiently". As this does happen frequently : it's a side effect of several antibiotics therapies DrYak (talk) 14:51, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mutualism in humans 

message: Killer whales of Eden, Australia should be added somewhere. --92.1.175.38 (talk) 16:37, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  An example 

message: Currently there is a mixture of links to articles to other languages about Mutualism and Mutualism (biology). Since Mutualism exists, wouldn't make sense to delete here all the links to generic Mutualism pages, keeping only those referring to Mutualism (biology)? --Qgil (talk) 19:01, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleaning inter-language links? 

message: "The Red-billed Oxpecker feed on ticks off the impala's coat" is in the mutualism article, yet the article on the Oxpecker suggests it is really commensalism or even parasitism, since the Oxpecker also pecks open wounds since it likes eating blood in general.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.233.24.24 (talk) 23:39, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wrong picture? Red0Billed Oxpecker 

message: Does that mycorrhiza image really belong here?  For one thing, it's got captions in Czech.  In the image description, the image's contributor says he "can provide you with my image without the words", so maybe someone should contact him and take him up on that?  Or maybe the image would better be removed from the article entirely -- even without the captions, or with English captions, it's apparently hand-drawn with markers, and, at the risk of offending the contributor, may not really be up to encyclopedic standards.  (Aside from which, the description of the image implies he may have copied it from a picture in a textbook, which means, depending on how closely he copied it, it may have copyvio issues as well...) ----Smeazel (talk) 11:39, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, this is not an appropriate image here --Epipelagic (talk) 20:27, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mycorrhiza image 

message: Hello! This is a note to let the editors of this article know that :File:Impala mutualim with birds wide.jpg will be appearing as picture of the day on November 9, 2011. You can view and edit the POTD blurb at Template:POTD/2011-11-09. If this article needs any attention or maintenance, it would be preferable if that could be done before its appearance on the Main Page so Wikipedia doesn't look bad. :) Thanks! howcheng  {chat} 17:33, 7 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[:File:Impala mutualim with birds wide.jpg]] to appear as POTD soon 

message: Hello! I just wanted to let you know that I added a hyperlink for Amphiprion ocellaris into your article. I am a part of a Behavioral Ecology Class (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Program:Washington_University_in_St._Louis/Behavioral_Ecology_%28Fall_2013%29) Washington University and our assignment was to create hyperlinks from our articles to other articles as examples. Best of luck with your article!!
Gseehra123 (talk) 22:17, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Edit 

message: : I suppose each species would experience some reduction of fitness as you describe, but wouldn't one of the species experience a net increase in fitness? E.g. a tapeworm might have some injury inflicted by its unwilling host, but without that relationship, have no means of survival. Or am I misunderstanding something? (I'm not a subject-area expert, just reading the article as a layperson.) It would be nice to have the article be extra clear about what it means, anyway, I think, since this wording seems counterintuitive to me. Thanks! :) —｜✝️｜they/their｜😹｜T/C｜☮️｜John 15:12｜🍂 18:11, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks for asking. The competition in and of itself inflicts a cost on both parties (whatever they invest in fighting, basically). There is in addition sometimes a reward for the winner, but often the result is just back to where things were before, so no gain on either side. Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:59, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  : Having looked over this again, it makes a lot more sense to me. Not least because the tapeworm in my example above is, I now suspect, only an example of parasitism, and not also of interspecies competition. (I'm not sure why I was trying to lump them together before, as the article seems pretty clear now and this makes a lot more sense.) Sorry for the trouble. Thank you for fixing my mistake, and thank you again for your patient and elucidating reply above! :D —｜✝️｜they/their｜😹｜T/C｜☮️｜John 15:12｜🍂 14:05, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question re: [[Special:MobileDiff/877442231]] 

message: To avoid the risk of confusing the reader, we should use consistent notation throughout the article, e.g. either M and N, or N1 and N2, but not a mixture.--- Ehrenkater (talk) 09:26, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Consistency of notation 

message: I think the distinction between "service" and "resource" interactions should be exchanged for an explanation of various major types of mutualism, such as cleaning symbiosis, zoochory, etc, because sometimes, it is unclear whether something counts as a "service" or a "resource." For example, if a plant provides nesting sites for a species of ants that in return cultivate and defend the plant, is this a "service" or a "resource"? Also, multiple of the examples offered are not strictly a single type, but include different aspects. PerytonMango (talk) 19:19, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unclear and contradictory categorization of types of mutualism