Plant: joke’s on you, getting you to propagate my species has been a wildly successful reproductive strategy
Human: sure, but it means you’ll go down with us as we destroy ourselves
Plant: …
Plant: shit
So will every other plant, though.
Yup “jokes on you, we rely on bees” Humans: kills the bees
I’ve heard the argument that the evolution of our ability to enjoy such things benefits both that pungent plant as well as us. By eating such things, we propagate them better. But the kind of insects and animals that would otherwise eat them wouldn’t assist propagation. So the plants evolved to both repel the disadvantageous eaters and attract the advantageous eater by the same method.
I kinda think that falls apart with horseradish though. Afaik, humans don’t spread anything directly with that. We can cultivate it, which helps the plant, but that’s not the same action as digging up garlic, eating some, and spreading the cloves, or the seeds from peppers. That puts a hole in this specific set of plants with that idea.
Peppers are that way because birds don’t taste the hotness and they spread seeds further than other animals. I guess humans spread seeds even further as you can get them shipped from another continent really easily. Although birds also fly those distances, they poop more frequently.
Although birds also fly those distances, they poop more frequently.
You haven’t seen me with a belly full of spicy food.
How do we propagate horseradish?
When a horse and a radish love each other very much they do a special hug.
Kinda like potatoes, garlic, ginger, lots of plants. Dig it up, break of a chunk, eat the rest, replant chunk.
Growing my first horseradish plant this year. Do we not spread it around by breaking off chunks of root and sharing them around? Same as garlic, we’re taking pieces of root to grow more?
Have you ever done butt stuff after too many chilies the night before?
Spicy dick was not a fun time, I had to put it in a glass of milk for a while.
Icy hot will fix that right up
Hey you can’t trick me into putting Icy Hot on a Q-tip down my dick hole again.
That’s why you should use Mineral Ice.
If you think about, we “humans” are about as strange as creatures can get. We breathe oxygen, which is a corrosive gas. Metal exposed to oxygen starts to rust. Some common foods we eat like apples contain arsenic and other poisonous substances. By the time we’re adults, we have more foreign microbes living in our bodies than human cells. We’re pretty scary as a species all right. To other alien life out there, we’re probably going to seem like extremely mutant freaks.
We use oxygen to oxidise stuff for energy. Nothing odd about that, practically all Earth life does that and has since the oxygenation crisis
Yes but what I’m saying is, to life forms from other planets that breathe other gases, us humans breathing oxygen will seem as weird as what they breathe might seem to us. To us on earth, it’s perfectly normal and not odd, because it’s what we are used to.
Fruits, and by extension peppers, evolved to be eaten. Peppers are the fruit of the pepper plant, and generally speaking, fruits act as an enticement for animals to eat them and thus distribute their seeds.
It’s just that hot peppers specifically appear to have evolved a strategy to dissuade mammals from eating them, since the chemical that causes them to be hot primarily affects mammals, but not birds. It’s actually not an uncommon strategy, many fruits are distasteful or even poisonous to certain animals, but are perfectly edible to other animals in a way that suggests it is specifically beneficial to be eaten by some but not by others.
plant: evolves bitter taste
human: starves so has to eat whatever he can find
human: w/e, it was edible, I’ll get more of it, maybe only plant the ones that taste better than the rest
plant: I guess I’m domesticated now
Birds laugh at your spicy peppers. My parrots LOVE to eat jalapenos and raw red Thai peppers. In the wild they eat them and spread/fertilize the seeds, so they don’t taste the spicyness.
As a result they are bred in mass and dominate domestic agriculture. Long term strategy who knows but short term things are working out pretty ok I thinks.
