Plants often come across as unremarkable, but there are some plants that have very unique adaptive characteristics.
For example, the coconut tree claims to be the only plant that can rival the giant panda because it is different from its peers in many ways, just like the giant panda, breaking 11 botanical records in one tree.
What's even more interesting is that before it was discovered, legends about it spread throughout the three continents of Asia, Europe and Africa, as their special seeds were carried by waves to the coastal areas of the Indian Ocean from time to time and picked up.
The picture above is the seed of the sea coconut tree, which can be said to be huge, with a diameter of 50 centimeters and a weight of 17.6 kilograms, making it the largest plant seed in the world.
I don't know what you think of when you see such a seed, in short, people in the coastal areas of the Indian Ocean used to think about the human buttocks and thought that this kind of thing has magical magic for men, and they still think so, so this seed has been quite precious since ancient times.
So what kind of plant is the sea coconut tree, why are their seeds so huge, so peculiar, and how do they spread their seeds?
Sea coconut trees on an uninhabited island
Sea coconut palms grow on uninhabited islands, but when their seeds fall into the ocean, ocean currents carry them to the shores of the Indian Ocean, which is the only way people initially came into contact with this seed (but that's not how they spread the seeds, I'll explain later), and is popular for its uniqueness, rarity, and mystery.
Among them, the Maldives is a frequent destination for coconut palm seeds – the place where they used to be most abundant.
The inhabitants of the island had to hand over the seeds to the king as long as they picked them up, otherwise they would be sentenced to death, and the king basically gave the seeds to his most distinguished international friends, which shows how precious this seed was in the past.
Before 1768, it was not known what kind of plant it came from, but it was believed to be the seed of some kind of tree.
Legend has it that the tree grows on the ocean floor, it is so large that the fruit is specially offered to a huge bird, and similar legends are widespread along the coast of the Indian Ocean, and Africans even believe that this giant bird preys on elephants.
Pictured: Sea coconut seed artwork
With the advent of the Great Voyage, the French explorer Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne visited the then-uninhabited islands of the Seychelles and finally found the tree growing this giant seed on the islands of Praslin and Currieuse, the only known places where sea coconuts grow.
When word of the news spread, in 1769 a man named Jean Duchemin saw a business opportunity and sailed to the Seychelles to pick the seeds, and on his first visit he took a whole shipload of seeds to the Indian market.
Since then, the seeds of the sea coconut tree have lost their mystery and extraordinary value, but even so, the seeds are still very expensive.
That's pretty much the story of the coconut palm seeds, but as we continue to explore them, we discover just how unique this tree really is.
How peculiar is the sea coconut tree?
From the appearance we can see that the sea coconut tree is actually a palm tree, but they are a little different from other palm plants, they have everything big and at the same time everything is slow.
They have the largest seeds in the plant kingdom and naturally have the largest wild fruit in the world, which can reach 36-47 kilograms, note that this is a wild fruit, because some artificially cultivated agricultural fruits can be much larger than it.
The sea coconut tree is a dioecious plant, in order to produce such a large fruit, they have the largest female flowers in the plant kingdom, as well as the largest carpel and the largest sepals, and the interesting thing is that the inflorescence of their male flowers is also the longest in the plant kingdom, which can grow up to 2 meters long, no one knows what the meaning of such a long length is.
In order to grow these organs to a large enough size, the method used by the coconut tree is to prolong the growth cycle, which is why I said earlier that everything is slow.
First of all, they are very slow growing, a coconut tree planted in the Royal Botanical Garden of Peradnaya has been recorded to grow an average of 33 mm per year over a period of 140 years, the slowest growing of any known medium and large tree.
A typical feature of palmaceae is a long trunk with a top spike, which contains about 20 large fan-shaped leaves about 10 meters in diameter.
But it takes them nine years to develop the spike and another nine years to develop fully functional leaves, while many other palms have a lifespan of less than 18 years (the sea coconut palm is believed to live up to 200 years).
Once these leaves are fully developed, each leaf has a lifespan of up to 24 years, the longest of all monocots.
It takes a full 8 to 10 years for their fruits to develop to maturity, which is also the longest cycle of any plant, and the dropped fruit takes two years to germinate if conditions allow, and the plant seeds can be preserved for a long time, which seems to be nothing.
However, when their seeds germinate, they produce the longest cotyledons in the plant kingdom, which can reach up to 10 meters, and no other plant has a cotyledon that can match them.
The reason why sea coconut palms are as special as giant pandas is because they also share a large number of highly specialized features on their bodies like giant pandas.
However, no matter how specialized the organism is, it is to improve the ability to survive and reproduce in a special environment.
Speaking of reproduction, we have to go back to their particular seed, which has many parts that science can't explain.
Seeds that can't be spread?
Organisms survive on islands and evolve to be larger than their continental relatives, which is common and is known as island gigantism.
However, there are some organisms that become smaller and smaller on the islands, a condition known as island dwarfism, such as the mammoths of Crete in the Mediterranean, which are the last mammoth to become extinct, with adults measuring only 1 meter tall at the shoulder and weighing only 150 kilograms, like larger wild boars.
Pictured: A "pygmy" mammoth in Crete, shorter than a man
The large size of the coconut seed is just a manifestation of their island gigantism, but it is unique in that it is the only plant in the entire Seychelles that has gigantism.
Since plants cannot move on their own, in order to avoid offspring competing with themselves, plants need to spread their seeds farther away, and depending on the environment in which they are grown, plants usually have several ways – wind, water, and animal intestines.
Most of the seeds we know are spread by animals, and these plants attract animals to eat by growing attractive fruits, and then the indigestible seeds are swallowed by animals and carried further afield.
Many plants that grow on islands tend to spread through seawater, such as the familiar palm palm palm, so you will find that their fruit has a hard shell to prevent corrosion by seawater.
Sea coconut palms are also typical of island palms, but their fruit actually sinks directly to the bottom of the sea, rather than drifting through the sea.
The seeds that drift to the shores of the Indian Ocean actually rot internally, causing them to float up before drifting with the currents and being picked up by the coastal dwellers.
Of course, it is unreasonable for them to rely on animals and nature for such a large seed, which is why they only live in two separate islands of the Seychelles archipelago, because they cannot be spread at all.
So what's the point of such a big seed?
When many people see this irrational trait, they wonder if the creature has fallen into an evolutionary dead end, turning its own dominant trait into a burden.
Actually, no, the sea coconut tree is not a dead end, on the contrary, it has an absolute advantage in its habitat - about 80% of the trees in the forests of the two islands are made up of this plant.
The reason why their seeds do not currently have a spreader is not because they have become larger, but because they have lost their momentum to spread before the seeds have grown.
Scholars in this area believe that the ancestors of the coconut tree relied on animals to disperse seeds about 66 million years ago, but after the Seychelles began to break away from India, the coconut palm was isolated on the islands, losing its animal transmission mechanism.
But why did the seed become so big after that?
This is actually caused by involution.
Larger seeds have the advantage of growing faster and better, which is crucial in islands, so island plants usually tend to have large seeds.
Sea coconut palms may have had larger seeds of their own before they were isolated by the islands, so as isolation occurs, they quickly sweep away competitors and become the dominant population in their habitat.
At the same time, because their seeds cannot be disseminated, they turn to inter-population competition, that is, crazy involution.
They don't have to think about how the seeds are spreading, which makes it possible for them to grow bigger, but with so little space to survive, they start to frantically make the seeds bigger in order to grow faster than their siblings.
So much so that the seeds eventually developed this unreasonable size [1].
At last
You may also have a question: if they can't spread seeds, doesn't that mean they will fall around themselves to compete with themselves?
Indeed, some even believe that their seeds will not germinate until the mother plant dies.
Although it is not exaggerated to the extent that one life for another, they are indeed passed down in this way, and when the seeds germinate and blossom and bear fruit, the mother plant will not have much time.
This plant also has two interesting features that are completely different from other plants, and the concentration of nitrogen and phosphorus in their leaves is only about a third of that of other trees in the Seychelles, because they give most of the nitrogen and phosphorus to the seeds, so that they themselves are a little malnourished.
Not only that, but they also have a very good flow diversion effect, which can wash dead flowers and leaves, guano and other substances into the soil around the roots, which causes the concentration of nitrogen and phosphorus in the soil within 20 cm of the trunk to be at least 50% higher than that of soil 2 meters away, which is only found in them.
Of course, this trait is mainly due to the seeds, which usually only drop in this area.
Regardless, the coconut tree does have a rivalry with the giant panda, but they are now an endangered species, just like the giant panda – fewer than 8,000 mature individuals in the wild.
And the reason why they are endangered is also very strange, just because their seeds look like human buttocks and are picked too much.
Reference:
[1]. http://dks.doi.org/10.1111/nf.13272