[HN Gopher] Trees guard their seeds: Unlocking the secrets of ma...
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Trees guard their seeds: Unlocking the secrets of mast seeding
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 45 points
Date : 2023-08-28 12:14 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| h2odragon wrote:
| I've noticed different tree species throw their parties at
| different times. Assuming that its not just a bad year for plants
| like last year was, where _everything_ is impacted. If the White
| Oaks are having a bad year, its likely that the Red Oaks or the
| Hickory trees will be bearing heavier than usual.
|
| I've walked in the woods for years; this is the impression i have
| from that experience. I don't see a good way to capture this in
| numerical data form, tho. You'd have to have a pretty good and
| consistent sampling technique over maybe 100 acres of forest; and
| would probably need to do sampling on multiple patches that size
| at some distance from each other. Over a span of decades.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Stone fruits such as apples, peaches and plums have a tendency
| to produce fruit more heavily every other year.
| [deleted]
| getarofilter wrote:
| [dead]
| hinkley wrote:
| Damnit.
|
| There are two 'mysteries' around mast years: One, which this
| article covers, is pretty much common wisdom at this point. Does
| 'common wisdom' need to be reviewed? Of course it does.
|
| The bigger mystery is HOW DO ALL THE TREES KNOW? Mast years don't
| happen in one grove, in one strain or in one forest. They happen
| everywhere, even in different microbiomes that may have received
| more or less rainfall that year.
|
| I was hoping this was delving into that secret, for which no
| theories have survived testing.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| There are, of course, theories that trees / plants communicate
| in some way (e.g. chemical markers, similar to pheromones), but
| if you haven't found anything solid then they haven't found any
| conclusive evidence yet. There's probably loads we haven't
| discovered yet. I mean didn't they discover a whole new system
| in humans (next to the blood vessels, nerves and lymphatic
| system)?
| hyllos wrote:
| Well, I'd be not too much surprised if it's an external
| factor like sun cycle, earth magnetism or any other natural
| rhythm. Did they exclude that? How, if?
| hinkley wrote:
| They discovered the lymphatic system has channels in
| connective tissue. Is that the one you're thinking about?
|
| A lot of Eastern Medicine and massage people I'm sure felt
| vindicated by that one.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Uneducated hypothesis; the choice of a mast year isn't random,
| but is some sort of response to the environment. If that's
| true, then multiple trees in the same environment will tend to
| have the same mast years.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's all the trees in at least a bioregion though. If they're
| not upwind or downwind from each other, if some are in the
| foothills and see more rain, nobody has caught them masting
| on a different cycle. Which is just fuckin' weird.
| surge wrote:
| This is kind of cool, last year the trees in my yard released an
| obnoxious amount of acorns compared to most years. This explains
| why.
| c0nsumer wrote:
| Ours are doing that this year... White oak and burr oak. And
| this helped us learn our new dog likes the taste of acorns.
| <sigh> Which means acorn-y poop and us having to constantly try
| to stop him from eating everything on the ground.
|
| I'm really looking forward to a not-mast year. And looking into
| how I might be able to vacuum these up.
| hinkley wrote:
| There's a device that is a wire ball on a stick. Looks a bit
| like a bingo ball cage. The idea is that you roll the ball
| over the acorns, the pressure pushes the wires apart and the
| acorn pops into the ball, and then doesn't have enough force
| to exit again.
| koliber wrote:
| Last year the oaks were kind. This year we will be covered in
| acorns. I guess mast seeding is not coordinated world-wide.
| contingencies wrote:
| Nice research and great to see Poznan featured: it is a great
| town if you get a chance to visit. Just don't drink vodka with
| the locals, they're nutters.
|
| Some seeds I am pretty amazed by are some of those of the cycads.
| Check these out:
| https://i.pinimg.com/474x/3f/35/ca/3f35ca3dbdfbaf957ad6ca333...
|
| They both have spikes and are physically quite large and hard, so
| large and hard in fact that nothing alive can eat them.
|
| Apparently a going theory is that they previously largely
| depended upon distribution by extinct macro-fauna. I wonder: does
| that mean the groves that we find in the Australian bush date
| from periods of macro-fauna? Anthropogenic distribution is
| limited to 65,000 years, water can move seed, yet many are in
| places for which water cannot account for seed dispersal.
|
| What a shame that we are destroying and mismanaging everything
| for short term need through ignorance.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I wonder why they are using the term "consumer satiation
| hypothesis" over the more common "predator satiation".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_satiation
| hinkley wrote:
| Because we don't consider vegetarians to be predators.
| lainga wrote:
| In some food-chain dynamic models, the leaf-browsing gazelle
| and the mosquito are both "micropredators", as in they
| consume part of the prey organism without killing it. It's an
| interesting framing.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Because most people don't consider squirrels predators and
| acorns prey, I'd assume.
| ortusdux wrote:
| Predation is a commonly used term in horticulture, especially
| in situations like this. From what I can glean, it is
| considered predation if the plant's lifecycle is interrupted.
| For example, cows would not be considered predators, but
| goats would be (browsing vs grazing animals). See also Seed
| Predation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_predation
|
| This writeup is a summary of the paper "Global patterns in
| the predator satiation effect of masting: A meta-analysis".
| This paper was published over a year and a half ago, and does
| not include the term "consumer satiation hypothesis".
|
| When I google "consumer satiation hypothesis", I get 6
| results, most of which are this post and similar writeups
| from the last few days.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is that it looks like someone else is
| introducing a newly named or obscure hypothesis, and then
| backing it up with a paper that does not use that term, and
| instead only uses the already extant and well established
| hypothesis.
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