war and glory, reinvention

These are the notes for "Beautiful, Damn Hard, Increasingly Useful."

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How Dinosaur Extinction Gave Us Fruit

I found this video entertaining for its discussion of r-strategy vs. k-strategy reproduction in plants.  Interestingly, during the time of large sauropods, they broke up the forests so much that most plants preferred to make many small seeds rather than fewer large seeds.  They had to capitalize on the disturbances to find a place and sprout.  In other words, most or all of the plants in those forest behaved like weeds, which are designed to cover disturbed ground as fast as possible.

Later on, after the sauropods died out, the forest canopy became closed rather than open, the forest floor darker.  The animals were much smaller, and well suited to distributing seeds.  So plants began making larger fruit to bribe the animals to carry their seeds around.

An interesting fork appears before us now, as humans have wiped out almost all large animals.  Normally this would lead to dense dark forests, and thus, more and larger fruits.  But humans are more disruptive than even the sauropods.  We are creating conditions that favor the weed strategy again.  Except for the bit where we really love large, sweet fruits and will go farther than any other species to propagate plants that we like.  That makes it rather a toss-up how plants will respond.