How trees guard their seeds with mast seeding | Hacker News Reader

How trees guard their seeds with mast seeding

phys.org

72 pointsPaulHoule25 comments

I've noticed different tree species throw their parties at different times. Assuming that its not just a bad year for plants like last year was, where everything is impacted. If the White Oaks are having a bad year, its likely that the Red Oaks or the Hickory trees will be bearing heavier than usual.

I've walked in the woods for years; this is the impression i have from that experience. I don't see a good way to capture this in numerical data form, tho. You'd have to have a pretty good and consistent sampling technique over maybe 100 acres of forest; and would probably need to do sampling on multiple patches that size at some distance from each other. Over a span of decades.

Stone fruits such as apples, peaches and plums have a tendency to produce fruit more heavily every other year.

Damnit.

There are two 'mysteries' around mast years: One, which this article covers, is pretty much common wisdom at this point. Does 'common wisdom' need to be reviewed? Of course it does.

The bigger mystery is HOW DO ALL THE TREES KNOW? Mast years don't happen in one grove, in one strain or in one forest. They happen everywhere, even in different microbiomes that may have received more or less rainfall that year.

I was hoping this was delving into that secret, for which no theories have survived testing.

There are, of course, theories that trees / plants communicate in some way (e.g. chemical markers, similar to pheromones), but if you haven't found anything solid then they haven't found any conclusive evidence yet. There's probably loads we haven't discovered yet. I mean didn't they discover a whole new system in humans (next to the blood vessels, nerves and lymphatic system)?

They discovered the lymphatic system has channels in connective tissue. Is that the one you're thinking about?

A lot of Eastern Medicine and massage people I'm sure felt vindicated by that one.

Well, I'd be not too much surprised if it's an external factor like sun cycle, earth magnetism or any other natural rhythm. Did they exclude that? How, if?

Uneducated hypothesis; the choice of a mast year isn't random, but is some sort of response to the environment. If that's true, then multiple trees in the same environment will tend to have the same mast years.

It's all the trees in at least a bioregion though. If they're not upwind or downwind from each other, if some are in the foothills and see more rain, nobody has caught them masting on a different cycle. Which is just fuckin' weird.

fungi network? There were studies how the trees help each other through the fungi networks - though my thinking is that it is fungi who balance the tree coverage to their liking. Either way the studies clearly established that the fungi network is a tree communicating network of at least grove-scale. I think it may as well be much bigger - especially if it is fungi who would orchestrate, or at least symbiotically help to orchestrate, the mast year behavior.

Has the mycorrhizal network been tested as the communication method?

Wouldn't this occur naturally if trees were "programmed" to have a mast year every N years? Sure, some trees wouldn't be synchronized at first, but the likelihood of propagation is proportional to the number of other trees sharing a mast year, so eventually groups of trees that were synchronized would emerge.

Nice research and great to see Poznan featured: it is a great town if you get a chance to visit. Just don't drink vodka with the locals, they're nutters.

Some seeds I am pretty amazed by are some of those of the cycads. Check these out: https://i.pinimg.com/474x/3f/35/ca/3f35ca3dbdfbaf957ad6ca333...

They both have spikes and are physically quite large and hard, so large and hard in fact that nothing alive can eat them.

Apparently a going theory is that they previously largely depended upon distribution by extinct macro-fauna. I wonder: does that mean the groves that we find in the Australian bush date from periods of macro-fauna? Anthropogenic distribution is limited to 65,000 years, water can move seed, yet many are in places for which water cannot account for seed dispersal.

What a shame that we are destroying and mismanaging everything for short term need through ignorance.

This is kind of cool, last year the trees in my yard released an obnoxious amount of acorns compared to most years. This explains why.

Last year the oaks were kind. This year we will be covered in acorns. I guess mast seeding is not coordinated world-wide.

Ours are doing that this year... White oak and burr oak. And this helped us learn our new dog likes the taste of acorns. <sigh> Which means acorn-y poop and us having to constantly try to stop him from eating everything on the ground.

I'm really looking forward to a not-mast year. And looking into how I might be able to vacuum these up.

There's a device that is a wire ball on a stick. Looks a bit like a bingo ball cage. The idea is that you roll the ball over the acorns, the pressure pushes the wires apart and the acorn pops into the ball, and then doesn't have enough force to exit again.

Thanks, this is a good idea. I'll give that a look.

Seems to go by the name "nut gatherer" or "nut harvester".

Example: <https://www.agrisupply.com/holts-nut-wizard-pecan-gatherer-n...>

I wonder why they are using the term "consumer satiation hypothesis" over the more common "predator satiation".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_satiation

Because most people don't consider squirrels predators and acorns prey, I'd assume.

Predation is a commonly used term in horticulture, especially in situations like this. From what I can glean, it is considered predation if the plant's lifecycle is interrupted. For example, cows would not be considered predators, but goats would be (browsing vs grazing animals). See also Seed Predation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_predation

This writeup is a summary of the paper "Global patterns in the predator satiation effect of masting: A meta-analysis". This paper was published over a year and a half ago, and does not include the term "consumer satiation hypothesis".

When I google "consumer satiation hypothesis", I get 6 results, most of which are this post and similar writeups from the last few days.

I guess what I'm saying is that it looks like someone else is introducing a newly named or obscure hypothesis, and then backing it up with a paper that does not use that term, and instead only uses the already extant and well established hypothesis.

Because we don't consider vegetarians to be predators.

In some food-chain dynamic models, the leaf-browsing gazelle and the mosquito are both "micropredators", as in they consume part of the prey organism without killing it. It's an interesting framing.

This is discussed in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Best book I’ve read in a long time.

Some cicadas which emerge en masse every 17 years. Seems like the same strategy.

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