What kinds of animal tissues are resistant to base corrosion?
22h 8m ago by thelemmy.club/u/bellsfry in science
Im doing a bit of worldbuilding involving some molluscs in an alkaline lake.
I read that plastics are resistant to base corrosion and later that some plastics such as polyethylene can be produced using organic materials such as ethanol from fermentation. I was thinking that these molluscs could ferment consumed plants and produce polyethylene in their bodies to create a base-resistant shell that would help them survive.
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Along with some other adaptations, I am wondering if they could viably develop shells made of a material resistant to base corrosion and would like some real life examples.
Chitin is a real biopolymer that makes up shells.
There are some organisms that have been modified to produce polymers from varuous food sources, but those are more for biofermentation production processes than something the organisms would use as a shell
You’re really going to have to define “plastics” to get a good answer to that.
Plastic in the material science definition means any material that can be permanently deformed without breaking. So, lots of materials created by living things meet that definition.
If you mean thermoplastics, which is the more common colloquial definition, well, several things meet that definition as well, including horn and many other types of keratin.
If you mean polymerized hydrocarbon based thermoplastics, which is what you probably are thinking of, chitin is the most common answer.
Now that I think about it I think I just threw the term “plastic” in because I thought it would give a rough area of inquiry because I read that “plastics” were base resistant.
Actually scratch that; what I was ultimately trying to find out was some examples of base resistant biological building materials, not necessarily plastics.
Apologies for being confused about terminology; I just finished my first year of chemistry
The universe wanted plastic for itself.