Dude, who even knows.

5th December 2022

Post reblogged from For Mutiny and Desertion with 34 notes

cop-disliker69:

max1461:

Prior to the human mass production of salt, where did the salt in terrestrial ecosystems come from? Did it all originate in the ocean and get transported long distance by chains of predation? Is there enough salt in the soil or something for plants to uptake in sufficient quantities?

I think it comes from rocks sometimes? I saw a nature documentary once and deep in the rainforest there was a salty rock outcropping that animals would congregate near and just spend minutes at a time licking. It was a treasured resource, like a watering hole in a savanna.

they crave that mineral

  1. pidoop reblogged this from cop-disliker69
  2. vriskakinnieaynrand said: halophytes? swiss chard can concentrate enough salt from the soil to taste salty
  3. icehouseprimitiveman said: Also rainwater has salt in it, sooooo do some evaporation cycles and you have terrestrial deposits. >t. Ecologist
  4. icehouseprimitiveman said: How do I @ everyone in this thread Salt tastes good because it’s essential yes, but it is not that difficult to come across in terrestrial ecosystems, all plants have some salt in them, and obviously omni/carnivores can receive a glut of salt with every kill. The origin? Litcherally just the ground, most if not all of the free salts available in an ecosystem comes from the leaching of salts from bedrock/caprock.
  5. raginrayguns reblogged this from kontextmaschine
  6. kontextmaschine reblogged this from cop-disliker69 and added:
    they crave that mineral
  7. selfmaderibcageman said: I mean, there’s a lot of salt in your piss. Unless you exclusively piss in streams that go to the ocean, your ions aren’t going anywhere when you consume and excrete them, they just stay in the inland ecosystem. i think plants are pretty good at concentrating them from water as well. You don’t think of them as salty but they still have to have sufficient osmolarity to function, you know?
  8. cop-disliker69 reblogged this from max1461 and added:
    I think it comes from rocks sometimes? I saw a nature documentary once and deep in the rainforest there was a salty rock...
  9. archosaurians said: There are inland deposits of salt. I imagine it’s because every now n then a small part of the ocean get landlocked bcus of shifting landmasses, and the orphaned ocean lake slowly evaporates away, leaving behind yummy salt mmm 🧂
  10. a-thousand-pots said: Some animals, like elephants, are able to extract salt via mining: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ki… I’m not sure how common this is or what proportion of biologically available salt on land comes from sources like this though
  11. collapsedsquid said: Some of it gets there from places that were once ocean
  12. max1461 said: @paradigm-adrift well yeah, but it’s required for biological processes, so it had to have been available somehow
  13. paradigm-adrift said: I think salt is delicious specifically because it’s somewhat difficult to come by?
  14. max1461 posted this
    Prior to the human mass production of salt, where did the salt in terrestrial ecosystems come from? Did it all originate...