The teacher asked us to turn in our homework
The teacher requested that we submit our homework. There’s this plant called Jewelweed, also known as Touch-me-not. Why you asked? Because when you touch its seed pods, they have a habit of exploding, sending the Jewelweed seeds into the air to spread them far and wide.
Then there’s the seeds of the Osiris plant which develop faster if they’ve been roughed up a little inside a bird’s digestive system. After that, they tend to try and grow wherever the bird drops them.
Foxtail seeds hitch a ride on animals’ fur, maple tree fruits surf on the wind, oak tree fruits or acorns sprout where squirrels bury them. Are you sensing a pattern here? The pattern is plants move, they migrate and spread over the globe just not in the same ways that animals do.
No, sometimes it is via those animals. Throughout land plants’ 500 million year long tenure on Earth, they’ve devised a lot of clever ways to get around. And when seeds, flowers, and fruits came onto the scene, well that was a major plant moment.