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Plants that use animals to disperse their seeds can find themselves in a pickle. They need to make fruit tasty enough to entice the local fauna. But they also need to make sure that their animal assistants don’t digest the very seeds they’re meant to spread.
In Israel’s Negev Desert, a plant called sweet mignonette came up with a distasteful strategy. Critters called spiny mice feed on mignonette. They love the fruit. But they hate the seeds. And so they spit them out all over the place. Just as the plant planned. That’s according to a study in the journal Current Biology. [Michal Samuni-Blank et al.,"Intraspecific Directed Deterrence by the Mustard Oil Bomb in a Desert Plant"]
Sweet mignonette produces little black berries that house about 20 seeds apiece. Inside those seeds is an enzyme. When a berry-chomping mouse crushes a seed, the enzyme is freed up to produce compounds that taste like hot mustard. Hence, ptooey, better leaving through chemistry.
Researchers armed with video cameras observed the mice spitting the pits like kids eating watermelon on a summer day. Nearly three-quarters of the spit-soaked seeds landed intact—and they actually germinated twice as fast as seeds taken directly from the fruit itself. It’s like a Dickens book: Great Expectorations.
—Karen Hopkin
[The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
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6 Comments
Add Comment"Just as the plant planned."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisC'mon people. I don't care what side of the evolution debate you favor, plants don't plan. I'd expect to see that in Weekly World news, not in a SciAm article. But then, I remember a somewhat different Scientific American several decades ago.
Back then it had serious articles that a well informed layman could read without insulting the intelligence of a bona fide scientist. No more, it seems.
I second FM1234's take on the older vs. the newer SciAm. I suppose the magazine could not sell adequate advertising or hold onto adequate readership without dumbing-down. Still, that leaves an empty niche that I hope will be filled sooner or later. (Watch your back, SciAm. Perhaps you could publish two electronic versions: Middle School Level and Scientifically Literate Level.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm SciAm's podcast editor. Indeed, the 60-Second Science podcasts back in the 1970s were far different from today's. Yes, we took a tiny bit of literary license. In case of any lingering doubt, however, the plants did not consciously plan anything. Cheers, steve
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think there are two mistakes in this passage.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfirst, the "ptooey" shall be "phooey"
second, the name of Dickens' book shall be "Great Expectation".
"Indeed, the 60-Second Science podcasts back in the 1970s were far different from today's."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDo tell. How about running a special feature called "Scientific American Podcasts of the 70s". I'm sure people would find it interesting.
thank you for pointing it out
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