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  • From: Douglas Hinds <cedecor@gmx.net>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] fruit trees
  • Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:12:34 -0600

On 12/23/2012 1:58 PM, Ben Martin Horst wrote:
Squirrels collect acorns and bury them in the ground, where some of them
sprout. That makes squirrels the oak trees best friends and
evolutionary partners, who do more good than harm, as long as oak trees
keep producing more than squirrels can eat. In that sense, for an oak
tree to develop an alternating high/low production strategy (which
attributes anthropomorphic motivation to oak trees), it would be
counterproductive to it's own reproductive success, since the squirrels
would eat them all and none would create baby oak trees.

Squirrels (and others) can only eat them all (and generally not even then)
in the poor mast years. Squirrel numbers are effectively limited to what a
tree (or grove, or forest) can produce in the poor mast years. That way, in
bumper crop years, the huge quantity of acorns that squirrels, jays, etc,
hide away cannot possibly be all found and eaten. A long-lived tree can
afford to extend its reproductive strategies over decades; short lived
rodents' and birds' populations can have spikes and valleys from year to
year, but on average are determined not by periods of bounty, but periods
of stress.

As you point out, squirrels are indeed a nut tree's evolutionary partners,
but the multi-year cyclical nature of mast crops is an essential part of
this partnership... it keeps the squirrel population to a level that is
useful to the long-term success of oaks, not pestilential.

Of course this is a simplified schema. There are a lot of other factors
affecting squirrel numbers, including other food sources available,
presence of predators, etc.
Diseases, Urban development, Environmental Contamination, ...
But in general, it's an elegant illustration of
the ways that symbiotic species define and limit their mutually-beneficial
relationships.

-Ben
OK, Ben - I'll go along with that (although a reference to a study confirming the specific relationship you describe would make the thesis even more convincing).

I believe that the important issue here is the fact that we'll ALL intertwined, so voluntary accountability and being aware of the existence of these relationships (and even thinking about them) is an excellent step on the road to discovering and implementing a solution.

Things don't have to be the way they are and examining and comprehending the alternatives (while looking for a better way) is a necessary adjunct to a happy ending for the human experiment and beneficial for all life on this planet.

Lawrence has built on that by creating these opportunities for interchange.

DH




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