
The avocado is an evolutionary anachronism - collapse
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-avocado-should-have-gone-the-way-of-the-dodo-4976527/
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crazygringo
> _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
And couldn't a new world monkey simply carry the avocado somewhere else to eat
it?

Does it _have_ to pass through the gut?

~~~
dehrmann
I've seen squirrels carry them to eat later (it's a ridiculous sight), but
humans imported both the squirrels and avocados here (the Bay Area).

~~~
zaarn
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.

~~~
dehrmann
Now that you mention it, a squirrel also stole a melon I was growing.

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Jedd
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.

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vfc1
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.

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pugworthy
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.

This actually has a name - Mutualism. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(biology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_\(biology\))
for example.

~~~
kochikame
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?

~~~
mijamo
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.

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plorg
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.

~~~
empath75
I’m pretty sure the consensus is that humans wiped them out.

~~~
barberousse
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.

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austincheney
At 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)

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leejoramo
Connie 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)

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brianprovost
Could 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.

~~~
tinco
If it was artificial selection, wouldn't the nut be smaller? All cultured
fruit has really small nuts/seeds.

~~~
maxerickson
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.

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HillaryBriss
> _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.

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gdcohen
They only do that to annoy us humans!

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FrozenVoid
Thats 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
Guard: 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
Where is this from? It sounds for all the world like something out of Holy
Grail, but I don't remember this bit.

~~~
tartuffe78
Yes, but with Coconuts and Swallows

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fencepost
(2013)

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caf
I wonder if the same is thought to be true of the larger mangoes.

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idlewords
The avocado did nothing wrong!

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Quipunotch104
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?

