Following subject of fruits, rewards, seeds and dispersers: Why the Avocado Should Have Gone the Way of the Dodo | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Long before humans, plants developed positive interactions with other animals. When humans arrived in this 'Garden of Eatin' they changed things around. For me there are few bigger stories in human ecology. Few topics attract such brilliant eccentric nearly-kooky ecologists of whom I stand in awe.
Should have gone, that’s the key to false theories. It’s always been a problem in history to formulate a theory first, based on nothing. The Earth is flat, the Blackplage is caused by open windows, no, closed windows. We have left the dark ages........lucky for us.
Yeah, on that, I reckon that vague taste and smell cues dissuade some animals from eating 'forbidden fruit' Don't dissuade others (who die) and species reproduction refills those losses. With most attention paid to humans, amazing that we have come to know what one can and cannot. And when you need to heat-treat or add some secondary chemical to kill the poison. Whole thing seems beyond our knowing, but somehow we have always had enough humans outside the kill zone to keep coming. I kinda want this to get into Drake equation - any planet with a species that might look to other stars would also have a lot of home-planet trouble.
