Post #4336406

@foaylward@genomic.social OMG this is the best story. Everybody has seen the bacterial growth curve: https://www.microbesnhealth.com/2024/10/growth-curve-batch-continuous-and.html The first part is "sigmoidal," S shaped. It starts exponential, but tapers off to a plateau. They stop growing. (Bacterial "growth" just means cell division.) How do they know? Well, each of them secretes a low level of signalling molecules into the culture. When the environmental concentration of that molecule reaches a certain threshold, they all sense it and stop dividing. Because if they kept going, they'd quickly exhaust environmental nutrients and then they all die. So they make a truce, and they all cooperate to stop. This curve lies in stark contrast to @hausfath@fediscience.org's global human curve, which is right before the point where everything runs out and you observe a sudden crash.