There are no acorns this year in some parts of the US | Hacker News Reader

There are no acorns this year in some parts of the US

washingtonpost.com

35 pointsingenium22 comments

If by anywhere you mean a small part of one country, then you would be correct.

Update: The title has been changed, it originally said that this year there were no acorns anywhere.

Zell began to do some research. He found Internet discussion groups, including one on Topix called "No acorns this year," reporting the same thing from as far away as the Midwest up through New England and Nova Scotia. "We live in Glenwood Landing, N.Y., and don't have any acorns this year. Really weird," wrote one. "None in Kansas either! Curiouser and curiouser."

Sounds to me like it's pretty significant portion of the US.

Except people don't post online that they have acorns. It's sort of like looking at Mac Fixit and deciding that all Macs are broken.

Also from the article:

> But many skeptics say oaks in other regions are producing plenty of acorns

I'm in Boston. Plenty of acorns on my street.

Northwest Boston suburbs here, there're acorns but a lot fewer than normal. I remember noticing it around October.

Billerica, north of Boston: I can report missing acorns.

A month ago my father-in-law and his relatives were exchanging missing-acorn stories, because the big oaks in his yard (I don't know what species) didn't produce any this year, and he's curious. He seems to think it was fairly unusual, and he's lived with those trees for decades and decades.

I guess it's not just him.

It would appear that something is up. Let's all hope that it's something transient.

Chelmsford, near Billerica: I have a ton of oak trees on my land, lots of fallen leaves, and no acorns. I didn't think about it until I saw this post though.

The article also says:

But many skeptics say oaks in other regions are producing plenty of acorns, and the acorn bust here is nothing more than the extreme of a natural boom-and-bust cycle.

And quotes from posts on internet discussion groups are hardly a reliable census method.

Are you an Acorn Change skeptic? Heretic!

I'd guess that the trees in a region have synchronized their reproductive cycles as an adaptation, like cicadas: hide from predators (thinning their ranks) for a period, then overwhelm predators the next period.

Either that, or they've adapted:

1) Produce no new acorns.

2) Environmentalists respond by planting hundreds of thousands of trees.

3) Trees laugh to selves very, very quietly.

(It is a joke, since the time scales are wrong, but the core is serious: if humans are the dominant selection pressure on the environment, then "natural" selection means "achieving maximum fitness for what the humans like".)

This would be my guess too, except that people are saying they haven't seen this extreme of an absence of acorns before. If this is an adaptation against acorn eaters, why is it so rare?

Also, squirrels don't just eat acorns. They also bury them and forget to dig them up, thus helping to produce more trees.

Favorite quote:

"...If you're a squirrel, it's a big worry..."

Hacker News. News for hackers.

And worried squirrels.

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/7gj3q/where_did_all...

(Shakes cane.)

Last year it was bees going missing[1]. Has anyone read any explanations about that phenomenon?

[1] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22where+have+all+t...

Not really.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Collapse_Disorder

It's always a good year for something. It's always a bad year for something. You hear about how it's a bad year for corn, or a good year for mosquitos, but you never hear about how it was a great year for strawberries. (Or how it was a bad year for mosquitos unless the report can work in an angle about mosquitos being the foundation of the ecosystem.)

The mere fact that acorns didn't drop is not, in itself, intrinsically interesting. It's always a bad year for something, that's what ecosystem diversity is about. The closer you look at the world around you, the more you notice the major variations in the output of plant life. The mere fact of variation is uninteresting.

So THAT'S why my mother was leaving walnuts on the porch. (In central Connecticut at the moment.) Hadn't asked yet. Wacky.

Flying back home tomorrow, I wonder if there's anything on the ground in Texas...

According to my Dad, the acorn crop has been so good in central Texas this year that corn feeders have been (relatively) ineffective at luring in deer.

Can you please change the title to accurately reflect the context of the article (see jonknee's comment).

I have acorns, northeast Pennsylvania.

Hasn't this fall been unusually cold and early? We had frosts in mid-October here, which is abnormal.

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