By Connie Barlow
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Extra resources for The ghosts of evolution : nonsensical fruit, missing partners, and other ecological anachronisms
Example text
Sure enough, when Dan Janzen cracked some crescentia fruits and tested the open halves on cattle, the animals showed no interest in the contents. Horses thus may not only be excellent surrogates for the missing Pleistocene partners of crescentia. They may be the sole surrogates. Because they swallow the pulp without much chewing, they do not injure the small seeds. Janzen reported that the same proportion of seeds that will germinate when taken directly from pulp (97 percent) will germinate when harvested from horse dung.
The pod of a legume tree, Enterolobium cyclocarpum, was the candidate anachronism subjected to the most rigorous testing. Janzen reported his results in a pair of papers published in the journal Ecology just a few months before the anachronism hypothesis appeared in Science. * He conducted the research during the summers of 1978 and 1979. Experimentation was simple but labor intensive. Janzen fed pods of the guanacaste tree (commonly known as monkey ears) to ranch horses under carefully controlled conditions.
Bringing Evolution into Ecology "Living organisms are beautifully built to survive and reproduce in their environments. Or that is what Darwinians say. But actually it isn't quite right. " Richard Dawkins made that statement to a gathering in London in 1 9 9 8 . As we shall see, exemplars of his message include plants with big fruits or ferocious thorns in tropical and temperate America. These botanical features—all made anachronistic by the loss of once influential partners—are a subset of Dawkins's broader mix of examples.