> The fruit had a larger pit and less flesh than today’s avocados, but it really served as a quick snack for big mammals like the mammoth... How the avocado still exists in the wild after surviving its evolutionary failures remains a puzzle. But once Homo sapiens evolved to the point where it could cultivate the species, the fruit had the chance to thrive anew. Back when the giant beasts roamed the earth, the avocado would’ve been a large seed with a small fleshy area—less attractive to smaller mammals such as ourselves.
I don't see the puzzle at all.
13,000 years ago yes humans hunted and killed off the megafauna. But they wouldn't be agriculturalists yet for thousands more years -- they still hunted and gathered. Avocados had a lot less fruit to them (since cultivation wasn't a thing yet), but that was true of many, probably most, wild fruits and vegetables at the time. Humans ate them all despite how they had less flesh -- they just ate more of them I guess. (And it's not like the avocado was more attractive to a mammoth than a person...) And so humans would have presumably been distributing the seeds as they took home sacks of them and some fell out, or they dumped leftover pits somewhere else in the forest.
The fact that avocados became cultivated in the first place almost certainly implies we were eating them already, and therefore transporting their pits often enough too.
I don't understand on what basis the author can assume humans weren't eating the original avocados...???
I had an avocado tree in the backyard growing up and the avocados would fall and grow new plants.
The next avocado you eat, leave it in an inch of water and it will sprout in a couple weeks, splitting in half to extend roots and a small canopy.
Had I not had to weed the backyard as a kid during avocado season, the plants would've kept growing from fallen avocados. They have these massive yolks that let them grow pretty much anywhere, as long as they find their way to some soil after a while.
I'm sure megafauna gave them a nice travel system.
Squirrels will carry and eat pretty much anything (rats of thre trees) including avocadoes, apples, small melons, compost, other squirrels and dead birds. If they can move it, they eat it. Plus points if it can be burried for winter.
Thanks for sharing this. That article is very interesting. I only thought about the fact that squirrels were a native species and didn't consider the fact that cities are not "natural".
it really served as a quick snack for big mammals like the mammoth...
As a metaphor it works, but is unprobable that a species carefully adapted to extreme chilling cold and another species adapted to do no stand any cold would share space and a trophic link
An even better 'at the next party' factoid about avocados is that they're technically monoecious, but practically you need two plants to get good pollination.
Monoecious means they have both male and female flower parts on the same plant ... but interestingly with avocados both bits don't work at the same time.
There's two types of avocado trees, helpfully called type A and type B. Type A is functionally female first, and then (a day or two later) male. Type B is the other way around.
They're one of very few plants to work this way, though I don't imagine it would have confounded early practitioners of agriculture.
It's a very unique fruit, unlike most commercial fruits available in the west it's 85% fat, it's got 7 grams of fiber, and a single fruit has about 320 calories.
That is about the caloric equivalent of 3 medium-sized bananas.
It's a great source of healthy fats, and very satiating due to the high fiber content.
Definitively something to be included in a healthy diet, but bear in mind that due to the high caloric content, if you eat a whole avocado with some toast that is going to give you the caloric equivalent of a whole meal.
So if you eat them every day in addition to your standard diet, it's going to add a lot of calories to your daily total. The suggestion is to eat them occasionally as guacamole making a meal out of it, or eat a smaller portion as a snack.
In their natural state, avocados are ripe about two weeks per year, so it's not something that we had the opportunity to eat a lot of in the past.
Definitively a healthy thing to add to the diet, I eat maybe one or so a week.
Here's a way to view evolutionary theory: a plant that is extremely tasty becomes cultivated, and protected by the species that eats it. As a result, the plant prospers.
I've heard cattle described like this. Cattle struck a bargain with humans where we spread them everywhere, protect them, and give them ample grazing room in exchange for their slaughter.
If cattle could speak, I wonder if they would appreciate this perspective of the situation. Personally I doubt it, which makes calling it "mutualism" a euphemism.
If treated well I think they would appreciate it until suddenly they would stop appreciating it.
From an evolutionary point of view is definitely a (perverted) mutualism (perverted as in the artificial selection on cows make them quite unfit to human-free life).
On the appreciation side it would be relevant to know more about how cows see humans. I believe many cows in farms are quite happy and many (more) cows are quite miserable.
> Personally I doubt it, which makes calling it "mutualism" a euphemism.
Overall if we assume cows do not have a cultural understanding of "humans are going to kill us" this would look more like a projection of our society on them.
I don't think them lacking knowledge of that fact changes the situation any, though pedantically I'll admit that it would change their perspective of it.
It changes everything in may opinion, but this is highly subjective as it is a human-to-human moral judgment.
My view on the topic is that there is a predefined innate concept of a good life for all complex life, including cows, and with my current knowledge I see no reason why a cow in a farm would be unable to live a good life. Obviously in too many cases industrial optimization is clearly opposed to this, still I see no reason not to call [0] (assuming the context given as true) a mutually beneficial relationship
Also, don't get too caught up in the idea of Avocado in the popular way - don't think about Guac and Avocado Toast.
It has a "higher fat content than most other fruit, mostly monounsaturated fat, and as such serves as an important staple in the diet of consumers who have limited access to other fatty foods (high-fat meats and fish, dairy products)." to quote Wikipedia.
But this falls down a little bit if you apply it to animals.
I mean, chickens are tasty and all, and there are probably billions of them in the world right now... but do you call living in a cage with your beak cut off "prospering"? From a purely genetic propagation point of view they are prospering I guess... but at what cost?
I don't think evolution cares about anything really. Plenty of species live pretty miserable lives, and evolution can lead them to even more miserable lives.
Evolution is not a conscious being, it is not positive nor negative, it does not try to achieve anything, and particularly not happiness for anybody.
In a similar way, we don't need to protect the environment in the sake of nature. Nature does not care, evolution does not care. Humans are the ones who care. We are the ones worrying about other animals lives, preserving species and landscape, both for romantic and practical reasons.
A super foreign virus could come tomorrow and kill all complex life on earth. Would that be a disaster? For us yes, but in general life would follow its course anyway and evolve again. Nothing has a meaning except the one we are to give.
> but do you call living in a cage with your beak cut off "prospering"?
Take dogs, 6-12 in a litter, can give birth twice a year. Naturally (street dogs) most young will die, those that end up in to adult hood will be half starved and diseased.
Not exactly a pleasant life, but having so many young, they can survive the high death / suffering rate.
I am not sure I would say street dogs prosper, but they are evolutionary successful
It's never been 100% clear to me what the accepted timeline of human inhabitation of the American continents was, but it seems clearly possible (or likely?) that humans and other megafauna existed close together. Given that fact, it's entirely possible that the plant (and the others mentioned) were cultivated by human, and one megafauna was replaced by another.
The fate of one of Daenerys' dragons in Game of Thrones comes to mind. A real good look at ecology and evolution really reveals how fragile everything really is.
There are two types of avocado that I see. One has a large pig, close to ping pong ball sizes. Then there's another with a much smaller, marble-sized pit.
It does say the fruit has been changed by humans, so presumably there is some evidence supporting that.
>Back when the giant beasts roamed the earth, the avocado would’ve been a large seed with a small fleshy area—less attractive to smaller mammals such as ourselves. Through cultivation, humans have bulked up avocados so there is more flesh for us to eat.
You can only go so fast when it takes 10 to 15 years to see what you got. They also don't breed true, so lots of those plants will produce uninteresting fruits.
Trees like oaks have the potential to be great producers of crops but have largely eluded cultivation, because they take decades to fruit for the first time.
> Rodents like squirrels and mice may have also contributed, as they traveled and buried seeds in the ground, rather than letting it rot on the surface.
Even today, it's common to see North American squirrels eating avocados right off the tree in Los Angeles.
Guard: Found them? In Mercia? The avocado's tropical!
King Arthur: What do you mean?
Guard: Well this is a temperate zone!
King Arthur: The resplendent quetzal may fly south with the sun, or the house marten or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land!
Guard: Are you suggesting avocados migrate?
King Arthur: Not at all! They could be carried.
Guard: What? A resplendent quetzal carrying an avocado?
King Arthur: It could grip it by the husk!
Guard: It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound avocado!
100 pounds? That ain't so mega. Wouldn't the prefix mega- imply they'd have to be, oh say... around a million pounds or so? A measly 100lb critter would just be a centifauna, right?
I don't see the puzzle at all.
13,000 years ago yes humans hunted and killed off the megafauna. But they wouldn't be agriculturalists yet for thousands more years -- they still hunted and gathered. Avocados had a lot less fruit to them (since cultivation wasn't a thing yet), but that was true of many, probably most, wild fruits and vegetables at the time. Humans ate them all despite how they had less flesh -- they just ate more of them I guess. (And it's not like the avocado was more attractive to a mammoth than a person...) And so humans would have presumably been distributing the seeds as they took home sacks of them and some fell out, or they dumped leftover pits somewhere else in the forest.
The fact that avocados became cultivated in the first place almost certainly implies we were eating them already, and therefore transporting their pits often enough too.
I don't understand on what basis the author can assume humans weren't eating the original avocados...???