ELI5 Why do some trees have fruits with a rewarding taste like saying “come back again :)” and some others have fruits with a punishing taste and even protection around the fruit like “don’t u even dare eat my fruits! >:/”
Might be wrong, but most species of animals eating fruit, just poop out the seeds of said fruits again, helping them to spread and reproduce. So it would actually be beneficial for the fruits to be eaten.
Fruits which are tasty are designed to be and ready to be eaten, carried around somewhere far from where they grew, and dropped. This is their way of effectively reproducing.
Fruits which are not tasty are either not ready (not yet mature enough to take the gut route) or not designed for YOU to disperse them. Some spicy peppers for example evolved for birds to eat and disperse them.
Trees sometimes play favorites. They attract the animals that do the best job helping the trees out, with pollination or with spreading around their seeds. Trees that smell like garbage might use flies to help reproduce, or trees with delicious fruit might hitch a ride in other animals’ digestive systems so they can be “deposited” somewhere far away and grow there.
Generally those fruits are to be eaten by different types of animals. For instance, birds aren’t affected by spice. Spicy peppers are intended to be eaten by birds and carried far away. The spice is too stop mammals from eating them.
It mainly have to do with what kind of animals do the tree want to eat it seeds.
Trees want animals to eat their fruits and carry their seed far away. However trees also has reference and they evolve punishing taste to repel animals they don’t want to carry their seed. For example, chilies are spicy to anything that isn’t bird because chilies plant want their seed to be eaten and carry by birds, not some monkeys.
Trees want certain animals to spread their seeds, so the ones that have adapted to be more attractive to particular species are more successful at spreading – through visuals, smell and taste.
One species might have enzymes that break down the seeds, so the plant may have chemicals that make their fruit taste horrible to them, while a more desirable species will be immune to it.
The chili is a good example. The capsaicin is meant to be unpleasant to mammals, but birds are unable to taste it, so they can eat the bright chili and fly away to poop out the seeds.
Using fruit as a seed dispersal method is incredibly effective, to the point where some plants can begin evolving to favor certain animals over others for eating their fruit.
Many poisonous berries like Deadly Nightshade, Pokeweed, Mistletoe, Holly, etc, primarily favor birds for dispersing seeds over mammals, so they use toxins that don’t affect birds to deter mammals. Chili Peppers are spicy for this exact same reason, birds can’t really taste the heat. Fruits with a tough or even spiny outer rind, like the Durian, may favor animals that also happen to have ways to chew throw or crack open the fruits.
Fruits also have to defend against attack from hungry insects which do not help to disperse the seeds, so some of these defenses may be intended to deter insects from boring or chewing on the fruit and ruining it, but not so much that a determined larger animal can’t get at it.
Do you know the Durian fruit? It’s thorny and smells intense. But animals like elephants, tigers, civets, and orangutans love it, and they’re the ones that help spread its seeds.
It’s nature’s version of targeted marketing. The thorns keep the wrong animals out, and the smell draws the right ones in.
The reason is that different animals taste different chemicals in food, and some animals can’t taste a thing at all that other animals can. So the fruit that tastes bad to a human may taste just fine to some other types of animal. The plant has a strong evolutionary incentive to favor having its fruit eaten by the animals that do the best job of planting its seeds, and to avoid having its fruit eaten by the animals that do a very bad job of planting its seeds. So it can evolve a taste that is liked by the animals that do a good job planting its seeds and also disliked by the types of animals that don’t do a good job.
While it’s not a tree, pepper plants have a very fun example of this because it got weirdly inverted in a way that worked out in the pepper plant’s favor. Pepper plants spread better when eaten by birds than when eaten by mammals. Two reasons are: (1) The birds’ digestion doesn’t destroy the seeds as severely as mammals’ do, and (2) Because they fly, the birds tend to poop the seeds a longer distance away from the parent plant than mammals do. Peppers developed a strategy to make their seeds get eaten more by birds than mammals by introducing a chemical, capcsaecin, that triggers a false pain sense in mammals, but doesn’t register with birds at all. This is the “spice” in peppers that you “taste” (techincally it’s not taste, it’s pain, but we’ll gloss over that).
Most mammals would avoid the peppers because of the pain sense.
Until this one weird mammal came along called a human, that actually liked the pain in some sick masochistic way. Even more, this mammal practices agriculture so it’s probably the best possible animal for the plant to get to like its fruit, in the sense that it does a really good job of spreading the plant’s seed. Better than a bird, even. Because a bird spreads it randomly on accident, while a human does it deliberately to create more of the food it wants.
Ironically, the thing that made the humans want to do this is the very thing the plant developed as a means to discourage mammals like humans from wanting to eat it, the pain of capsaecin. But humans serve the plant’s needs to get more of that sweet, sweet, pain they like, which breeds the plant to be even more sadistic with the pain, to get its masochistic human servants to help it even more.
A lot of poor explanations in here that implies trees showed ‘intent’ in their evolution. You can’t say trees evolved ‘to’…. Evolution is not intentional.
Trees evolved in a way that some favored fruit traits attractive to certain animals, which then dispersed their seeds. Taste is subjective
Natural selection favored trees whose fruit was eaten by animals, aiding in further seed dispersal.
From the plant’s perspective, fruits aren’t made with the primary purpose of being eaten. Their primary purpose is to distribute and plant seeds. Being eaten is just a mechanism to distribute seeds over a distance that some plants use. Not all plants benefit from their fruits being eaten, so they will develop defense mechanisms like foul tastes, inedible skins, and toxins to prevent that from happening.
Lots of fruit and vegetables are human intervened , search up wild nature bananas or wild cucumbers , they look nothing like what exists in grocery stores
Tomato’s are a particularly interesting one – they are intended to be eaten. The seeds are more likely to germinate if they have been exposed to stomach acid, and shit works as a fertiliser for the new plants.
It’s a evolutionary by-product where plants need to have their seeds carried and planted over vast distances and they do that by making their fruit more edible and appealing to us mammals and then we excrete the seeds elsewhere and let them grow. Likewise with sour, unpleasant fruit. They don’t want to be eaten or only grow in a specific area or only want a certain species pollinating them and not have us eat them.
You know how they say “don’t stick your dick in crazy”?
Same concept. You could spread your seed with a nice, cute girl that smells like a peach, but sometimes you might meet a crazy goth girl whose red flags rival the Soviet union, and you’d be like “I’d tap that”.
Many trees rely on being attractive to others to spread, others rely on things like the weather or other weird ways of pollination and spreading seeds. It’s mostly “what works best for them”, and countless species may have gone extinct because they didn’t fit natural selection.
For other living beings to scatter their seeds around.
You’re not supposed to like all fruits and berries anyway, some are outright toxic to you but not to some species, those species then digest the fruits and berries and shit out the seeds at some random location.
Also keep in mind our taste buds vary from human to human, there’re people who don’t like bananas for example, doesn’t mean all bananas taste bade (quite the contrary).
In the end tho we humans aren’t the main target audience for trees, that’s the birds.
If it’s sweet and tasty (or rich and fatty, like the unusual avocado), it evolved to be eaten by mammals like us. If it’s terribly bitter/sour/etc., it probably evolved to only be eaten by some creatures and not others. If it’s spicy because of capsaicin, it evolved to be eaten by birds, not mammals (birds can’t taste capsaicin, it has no effect on them).
Properly speaking, the trees don’t “want” anything. They just do what their genes program for. But the evolved fruit characteristics are meant to encourage seed to go to other places, either by being partially eaten and then dropped (e.g. the ancestors of domesticated apples or avocados), fully eaten and then pooped out (the ancestors of domesticated cherries, various peppers, or coffee), or eaten and spat out (can’t think of any examples but I’m sure some exist).
It all depends on what strategy is indicated by the evolutionary adaptations that have accumulated in the plant.
As another example: Corn. The ancient ancestors of modern (entirely domesticated) corn were tiny, finger-sized little spikes with like twelve hard-as-a-rock kernels. The modern varieties of corn, particularly sweet corn, are the result of thousands of years of continuous human intervention, progressively reshaping its genome to produce larger, more colorful, more flavorful, softer, more nutritious, sweeter product. Corn never “should” have been a staple crop, it’s got a ton of not super desirable characteristics for a staple crop. But after a crapton of human work, we had engineered it to be a staple crop (and damned tasty for that matter).
Fruits with nuts or seeds inside are appetizing because they’re picked up, eaten and then the unappetizing core (apple) or seeds (orange) are spit out or thrown onto the ground which lets that fruit then grow itself there.
Small fruits with seeds that are edible like strawberries are primarily eaten by birds or small animals, which then digest everything but the hardened seeds and are pooped out onto random land to grow there with its own poop fertilizer source.
Fruits that don’t want you to eat them (or nuts for that matter) that either have a spikey shell or are hard to open in general, are meant to be spherical and roll around until they get stuck somewhere and the shell breaks apart naturally with rain and acts as a foodsource for the seed to start growing out of.
Genetics in the past was always a balancing act. If a fruit is too delicious to one species and they eat all the fruit then that fruit dies out. If it is too bitter to all species then it has to have an alternate method of spreading seeds. The fruits we have today used to be largely based on “what worked”. Unfortunately now that is no longer the case. Plants are not necessarily bred for survival but for yield and taste. In the case of some fruits a disease could cause an entire species to be wiped out. Other things, like you cannot just grow an avocado you can eat.
Fruit is the way a lot of plants spread their seed. Edible fruits rely on animals to eat the fruit and poop out the seeds to disburse the seeds away from the mother plant, which reduces competition for resources and light. Of course, some seeds are disbursed by other ways, like wind or water, and some fruits shoot their seeds out when they are ripe, so the fruit doesn’t have that beneficial relationship with animals. Fruits that develop spikes and spurs often rely on attaching themselves to the fur of animals to be disbursed. Some seeds or nuts attract animals, who bury them, basically planting them naturally. The fruit of those plants mostly wants to deter being eaten before the seeds/nuts are ready. So you get all kinds of disbursal methods and different purposes to the fruits.
Going to bet some do the tasty fruits evolved indigestible seeds so you eat the fruit, poop it out, and then the seed has a chance to take root with built in fertilizer.
Animals like things that taste good so fruits that taste better are eaten and the seeds are spread much further from the tree, maybe in areas with less plants around. These seeds then do very well because there aren’t many neighbours to share resources with and they get the fertilizer from the animals poop. The tastier fruit ends up producing a better place for seeds to grow, so those plants do much better.
Animals don’t like discomfort or using a lot of energy. They will avoid that if they can. The plants with these defensive traits end up living better because animals can’t or choose not to mess with them as much, so it saves the plant energy that it can put toward growth or reproduction.
It essentially comes down to if it saves or gains an organism energy because the more energy an organism has, the stronger and more successful it will be.
evolution is random. the environment determines whether any given mutation is harmful and dies out, is useful and is passed down to other members of the species, or is neutral, in which case it may or may not get passed down.
Fruits have randomly evolved to be both tasty to one or more species (not necessarily all) so that they help to spread that plant around and to provide fertilizer. The taste is different because what’s tasty to some species are unpalatable or even poisonous to other species.
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Might be wrong, but most species of animals eating fruit, just poop out the seeds of said fruits again, helping them to spread and reproduce. So it would actually be beneficial for the fruits to be eaten.
Eat the fruit. Walk away. Poop out the seeds. New tree elsewhere in the world.
Human selective breeding aside,
Fruits which are tasty are designed to be and ready to be eaten, carried around somewhere far from where they grew, and dropped. This is their way of effectively reproducing.
Fruits which are not tasty are either not ready (not yet mature enough to take the gut route) or not designed for YOU to disperse them. Some spicy peppers for example evolved for birds to eat and disperse them.
Trees sometimes play favorites. They attract the animals that do the best job helping the trees out, with pollination or with spreading around their seeds. Trees that smell like garbage might use flies to help reproduce, or trees with delicious fruit might hitch a ride in other animals’ digestive systems so they can be “deposited” somewhere far away and grow there.
Generally those fruits are to be eaten by different types of animals. For instance, birds aren’t affected by spice. Spicy peppers are intended to be eaten by birds and carried far away. The spice is too stop mammals from eating them.
It mainly have to do with what kind of animals do the tree want to eat it seeds.
Trees want animals to eat their fruits and carry their seed far away. However trees also has reference and they evolve punishing taste to repel animals they don’t want to carry their seed. For example, chilies are spicy to anything that isn’t bird because chilies plant want their seed to be eaten and carry by birds, not some monkeys.
Trees want certain animals to spread their seeds, so the ones that have adapted to be more attractive to particular species are more successful at spreading – through visuals, smell and taste.
One species might have enzymes that break down the seeds, so the plant may have chemicals that make their fruit taste horrible to them, while a more desirable species will be immune to it.
The chili is a good example. The capsaicin is meant to be unpleasant to mammals, but birds are unable to taste it, so they can eat the bright chili and fly away to poop out the seeds.
Then humans figured that they actually liked it.
Some trees evolved to get only a specific type of animal to eat it.
For example, spicy flavors prevent mammals from eating peppers, but birds, which spread seeds farther, are not impacted by spiciness.
Avocados for example co-evolved with the giant sloth, which was big enough to eat the enormous pit whole.
Using fruit as a seed dispersal method is incredibly effective, to the point where some plants can begin evolving to favor certain animals over others for eating their fruit.
Many poisonous berries like Deadly Nightshade, Pokeweed, Mistletoe, Holly, etc, primarily favor birds for dispersing seeds over mammals, so they use toxins that don’t affect birds to deter mammals. Chili Peppers are spicy for this exact same reason, birds can’t really taste the heat. Fruits with a tough or even spiny outer rind, like the Durian, may favor animals that also happen to have ways to chew throw or crack open the fruits.
Fruits also have to defend against attack from hungry insects which do not help to disperse the seeds, so some of these defenses may be intended to deter insects from boring or chewing on the fruit and ruining it, but not so much that a determined larger animal can’t get at it.
Do you know the Durian fruit? It’s thorny and smells intense. But animals like elephants, tigers, civets, and orangutans love it, and they’re the ones that help spread its seeds.
It’s nature’s version of targeted marketing. The thorns keep the wrong animals out, and the smell draws the right ones in.
The reason is that different animals taste different chemicals in food, and some animals can’t taste a thing at all that other animals can. So the fruit that tastes bad to a human may taste just fine to some other types of animal. The plant has a strong evolutionary incentive to favor having its fruit eaten by the animals that do the best job of planting its seeds, and to avoid having its fruit eaten by the animals that do a very bad job of planting its seeds. So it can evolve a taste that is liked by the animals that do a good job planting its seeds and also disliked by the types of animals that don’t do a good job.
While it’s not a tree, pepper plants have a very fun example of this because it got weirdly inverted in a way that worked out in the pepper plant’s favor. Pepper plants spread better when eaten by birds than when eaten by mammals. Two reasons are: (1) The birds’ digestion doesn’t destroy the seeds as severely as mammals’ do, and (2) Because they fly, the birds tend to poop the seeds a longer distance away from the parent plant than mammals do. Peppers developed a strategy to make their seeds get eaten more by birds than mammals by introducing a chemical, capcsaecin, that triggers a false pain sense in mammals, but doesn’t register with birds at all. This is the “spice” in peppers that you “taste” (techincally it’s not taste, it’s pain, but we’ll gloss over that).
Most mammals would avoid the peppers because of the pain sense.
Until this one weird mammal came along called a human, that actually liked the pain in some sick masochistic way. Even more, this mammal practices agriculture so it’s probably the best possible animal for the plant to get to like its fruit, in the sense that it does a really good job of spreading the plant’s seed. Better than a bird, even. Because a bird spreads it randomly on accident, while a human does it deliberately to create more of the food it wants.
Ironically, the thing that made the humans want to do this is the very thing the plant developed as a means to discourage mammals like humans from wanting to eat it, the pain of capsaecin. But humans serve the plant’s needs to get more of that sweet, sweet, pain they like, which breeds the plant to be even more sadistic with the pain, to get its masochistic human servants to help it even more.
A lot of poor explanations in here that implies trees showed ‘intent’ in their evolution. You can’t say trees evolved ‘to’…. Evolution is not intentional.
Trees evolved in a way that some favored fruit traits attractive to certain animals, which then dispersed their seeds. Taste is subjective
Natural selection favored trees whose fruit was eaten by animals, aiding in further seed dispersal.
From the plant’s perspective, fruits aren’t made with the primary purpose of being eaten. Their primary purpose is to distribute and plant seeds. Being eaten is just a mechanism to distribute seeds over a distance that some plants use. Not all plants benefit from their fruits being eaten, so they will develop defense mechanisms like foul tastes, inedible skins, and toxins to prevent that from happening.
Could easily be posted in r/iamthemaincharacter
It’s tough to believe but old planet earth doesn’t solely revolve around humans.
Lots of fruit and vegetables are human intervened , search up wild nature bananas or wild cucumbers , they look nothing like what exists in grocery stores
Tomato’s are a particularly interesting one – they are intended to be eaten. The seeds are more likely to germinate if they have been exposed to stomach acid, and shit works as a fertiliser for the new plants.
It’s a evolutionary by-product where plants need to have their seeds carried and planted over vast distances and they do that by making their fruit more edible and appealing to us mammals and then we excrete the seeds elsewhere and let them grow. Likewise with sour, unpleasant fruit. They don’t want to be eaten or only grow in a specific area or only want a certain species pollinating them and not have us eat them.
You know how they say “don’t stick your dick in crazy”?
Same concept. You could spread your seed with a nice, cute girl that smells like a peach, but sometimes you might meet a crazy goth girl whose red flags rival the Soviet union, and you’d be like “I’d tap that”.
Many trees rely on being attractive to others to spread, others rely on things like the weather or other weird ways of pollination and spreading seeds. It’s mostly “what works best for them”, and countless species may have gone extinct because they didn’t fit natural selection.
I had a mountain ash tree as a kid and my dad told me the berries were for the birds
> What do the trees want
For other living beings to scatter their seeds around.
You’re not supposed to like all fruits and berries anyway, some are outright toxic to you but not to some species, those species then digest the fruits and berries and shit out the seeds at some random location.
Also keep in mind our taste buds vary from human to human, there’re people who don’t like bananas for example, doesn’t mean all bananas taste bade (quite the contrary).
In the end tho we humans aren’t the main target audience for trees, that’s the birds.
Assuming non-domesticated fruit:
If it’s sweet and tasty (or rich and fatty, like the unusual avocado), it evolved to be eaten by mammals like us. If it’s terribly bitter/sour/etc., it probably evolved to only be eaten by some creatures and not others. If it’s spicy because of capsaicin, it evolved to be eaten by birds, not mammals (birds can’t taste capsaicin, it has no effect on them).
Properly speaking, the trees don’t “want” anything. They just do what their genes program for. But the evolved fruit characteristics are meant to encourage seed to go to other places, either by being partially eaten and then dropped (e.g. the ancestors of domesticated apples or avocados), fully eaten and then pooped out (the ancestors of domesticated cherries, various peppers, or coffee), or eaten and spat out (can’t think of any examples but I’m sure some exist).
It all depends on what strategy is indicated by the evolutionary adaptations that have accumulated in the plant.
As another example: Corn. The ancient ancestors of modern (entirely domesticated) corn were tiny, finger-sized little spikes with like twelve hard-as-a-rock kernels. The modern varieties of corn, particularly sweet corn, are the result of thousands of years of continuous human intervention, progressively reshaping its genome to produce larger, more colorful, more flavorful, softer, more nutritious, sweeter product. Corn never “should” have been a staple crop, it’s got a ton of not super desirable characteristics for a staple crop. But after a crapton of human work, we had engineered it to be a staple crop (and damned tasty for that matter).
Fruits with nuts or seeds inside are appetizing because they’re picked up, eaten and then the unappetizing core (apple) or seeds (orange) are spit out or thrown onto the ground which lets that fruit then grow itself there.
Small fruits with seeds that are edible like strawberries are primarily eaten by birds or small animals, which then digest everything but the hardened seeds and are pooped out onto random land to grow there with its own poop fertilizer source.
Fruits that don’t want you to eat them (or nuts for that matter) that either have a spikey shell or are hard to open in general, are meant to be spherical and roll around until they get stuck somewhere and the shell breaks apart naturally with rain and acts as a foodsource for the seed to start growing out of.
Fruits taste delicious depending on who is the species the tree prefers to eat the fruits and poop the seeds.
Most cultivated fruits and vegetables barely resemble their wild cousins.
The domesticated cultivars put way more of their energy into large edible bits than the evolutionary strategy warrants.
e.g wild broccoli vs cultivated are hard to recognize as even the same plant.
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Genetics in the past was always a balancing act. If a fruit is too delicious to one species and they eat all the fruit then that fruit dies out. If it is too bitter to all species then it has to have an alternate method of spreading seeds. The fruits we have today used to be largely based on “what worked”. Unfortunately now that is no longer the case. Plants are not necessarily bred for survival but for yield and taste. In the case of some fruits a disease could cause an entire species to be wiped out. Other things, like you cannot just grow an avocado you can eat.
Fruit is the way a lot of plants spread their seed. Edible fruits rely on animals to eat the fruit and poop out the seeds to disburse the seeds away from the mother plant, which reduces competition for resources and light. Of course, some seeds are disbursed by other ways, like wind or water, and some fruits shoot their seeds out when they are ripe, so the fruit doesn’t have that beneficial relationship with animals. Fruits that develop spikes and spurs often rely on attaching themselves to the fur of animals to be disbursed. Some seeds or nuts attract animals, who bury them, basically planting them naturally. The fruit of those plants mostly wants to deter being eaten before the seeds/nuts are ready. So you get all kinds of disbursal methods and different purposes to the fruits.
Going to bet some do the tasty fruits evolved indigestible seeds so you eat the fruit, poop it out, and then the seed has a chance to take root with built in fertilizer.
Animals like things that taste good so fruits that taste better are eaten and the seeds are spread much further from the tree, maybe in areas with less plants around. These seeds then do very well because there aren’t many neighbours to share resources with and they get the fertilizer from the animals poop. The tastier fruit ends up producing a better place for seeds to grow, so those plants do much better.
Animals don’t like discomfort or using a lot of energy. They will avoid that if they can. The plants with these defensive traits end up living better because animals can’t or choose not to mess with them as much, so it saves the plant energy that it can put toward growth or reproduction.
It essentially comes down to if it saves or gains an organism energy because the more energy an organism has, the stronger and more successful it will be.
evolution is random. the environment determines whether any given mutation is harmful and dies out, is useful and is passed down to other members of the species, or is neutral, in which case it may or may not get passed down.
Fruits have randomly evolved to be both tasty to one or more species (not necessarily all) so that they help to spread that plant around and to provide fertilizer. The taste is different because what’s tasty to some species are unpalatable or even poisonous to other species.