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The avocado is an evolutionary anachronism
- brianprovost 7y agoCould it be possible that avocados were just smaller then and are only the size they are now because they have been bred by humans? I didn't see any mention of avocado fossils or remains.
- kissickas 7y agoIt 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.
- maxerickson 7y agoIt also mentions that there are still wild varieties around. Those could still show some effects of cultivation though, it depends on how much information there is too study and so on.
- tinco 7y agoIf it was artificial selection, wouldn't the nut be smaller? All cultured fruit has really small nuts/seeds.
- Psyonic 7y agopeach pits are pretty big
- maxerickson 7y agoYou 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.
- hetman 7y agoThe article indicates the opposite: "The fruit had a larger pit and less flesh than today’s avocados..."
- bluedino 7y agoThere 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.
- pugworthy 7y agoGiven it mentions Cenozoic, etc. I assume there is a fossil record. Leaves, wood, seeds - all definitely fossil-worthy.
- idlewords 7y agoThe avocado did nothing wrong!
- plorg 7y agoIt'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.
- empath75 7y agoI’m pretty sure the consensus is that humans wiped them out.
- barberousse 7y agoThe 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.
- pugworthy 7y agoHere'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. This actually has a name - Mutualism. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(biology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(biology) for example.
- pugworthy 7y agoAlso, 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.
- dehrmann 7y agoI'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.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoIf 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.
- afiori 7y agoIf 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.
- crazygringo 7y ago> 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...???
- ars 7y agoAnd couldn't a new world monkey simply carry the avocado somewhere else to eat it? Does it have to pass through the gut?
- caf 7y agoI wonder if the same is thought to be true of the larger mangoes.
- austincheney 7y agoAt least humans eat avocados. Nothing eats the horse apple. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maclura_pomifera https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maclura_pomifera
- HillaryBriss 7y ago> 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.
- gdcohen 7y agoThey only do that to annoy us humans!
- fencepost 7y ago(2013)
- FrozenVoid 7y agoThats a common myth, birds eat and spread avocado seeds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resplendent_quetzal#Feeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resplendent_quetzal#Feeding
- DonHopkins 7y agoGuard: Where'd you get the avocados? King Arthur: We found them. 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!
- dTal 7y agoWhere is this from? It sounds for all the world like something out of Holy Grail, but I don't remember this bit.
- tartuffe78 7y agoYes, but with Coconuts and Swallows
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- vfc1 7y agoIt'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.
- Quipunotch104 7y ago100 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?
- Jedd 7y agoAn 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.
- justanegg 7y agohave you seen an avocados nowadays, a seed could easily fit in a mammals stomach.
- leejoramo 7y agoConnie Barlow is an eloquent speaker on Evolution. I have seen her presentations several times. Highly recommended. http://www.thegreatstory.org/CB-writings.html http://www.thegreatstory.org/CB-writings.html