Duck and Cover!!
- Molly
- Feb 27, 2018
- 2 min read
Seeds. You eat them, you plant them, and that's pretty much it, right?
Wrong. They can shoot you.
Yeah, you read that right. There are seeds that shoot out of their mothers like bullets from a gun (hence, why it's called ballistic seed dispersal). Now, before we get to the fun part where we get to watch this happen, let's take a second to talk about why this happens.
Imagine you're a plant mother, you have a ton of teeny tiny embryos stashed away ready to go out into the world and make tiny new plants. But, you can't move. You're stuck right where you are, with limited amounts of nutrients, water, and sunlight. You want all of your babies to go out and live great lives, but you also can sacrifice your own health for them. So what do you need to do? You need to get them as far away from you as you can. Now, some plants do this with out catapulting their progeny through the air. They use fruits, or prickly, velcro-like seeds, or even the wind (see our upcoming article on Red Maples for wind moving seeds). But, these plants shoot their offspring into the air in the hopes that they will land in a nice patch of soil far away. Lucky for us, these innovative moms make for a great show.
Viola arvensis: The Wild Pansy
This little wildflower uses pressure to shoot seeds out. As the pods dry out, the "boats" that the seeds are in shrivel up. This slowly increases the pressure on the seeds until.....BOOM! Out they go, spreading this tiny flower's offspring all around it.
Watch this plant in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHqHSpZhjeY
Impatiens capensis: Touch-Me-Nots
If the name wasn't scary enough, just watch the video above! As the pods dry out, the pressure inside them increases, creating hyper-sensitive time bombs. As soon as they are touched, these plants unfurl with enough force to launch their progeny out into the world. As you can imagine, as each one explodes, more and more begin to shoot their seeds. Creating the craziest gun fight you have ever seen.
Ecballium elaterium: The Squirting Cucumber
These fruits have a rather interesting way of separating from their parents. As they fill slowly with a mucus-like liquid, the pressure within the fruit builds. This eventually causes the fruit to blast away from its parent, shooting the liquid out like a rocket. And, while they might be called cucumbers, don't be tempted to eat one-they're toxic!!
See this plant in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGXeyw3gwWE
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