There’s a Pax Romana/olive branch joke in there somewhere

I am pretty sure they were sentient, rotting fish guts.

And here we have a typical specimen exhibiting capitalist realism: Observe how the subject is analysing everything they come across on a "who works for who" basis, projecting human modes of production onto the universe. Applying it, even in vain, this reductive universality ensures that they will never think beyond it and, not thinking beyond it, not question either working for a capitalist or being a capitalist who is worked for, thereby in either case working for capitalism, a form of human cooperation in which happiness, well-being, yes even human connection (that necessitating eye-level communication) is traded for hastened advancement of the economy to achieve post-scarcity.

This is like the question I've always asked about getting sick.

Do you produce extra mucous because your body is trying to get rid of what's making you sick or does the illness make you produce more mucous in order to spread more easily?

Just like cats.

I so want to befriend my local crows, been meaning to buy some seeds for bribing them

You, a farmer, living in a thatched roof mud hut just alongside the field and spending 90% of your day - sun up to sun down - digging irrigation ditches, spreading fertilizer, and hauling around buckets of seed.

Me, a wheat grass, cozily settled into freshly irrigated mud, reaching towards the sun with my long fronds, spreading my seed between all my neighbors, and never having to worry about competitors because this dipshit ape-thing weeds the area for me every day in hopes of one day gargling my fermented plant-jizz until he blacks out.

Realistically the wheat lucked out that we thought it was delicious. I like the theory that it started as a three way symbiotic relationship between wheat humans and yeast, with accidental beer being the reason we started planting the stuff to begin with.

I would say it's symbiotic to the continued survival and propegation of their genes, but not to their well-being as individuals.

Yeah, influence is rarely a one way street and things like agriculture or animal husbandry have definitely changed us as well