Next time when you take an excursion into the wild, eat some fruits and you’ll help nature. Sounds interesting? Or am I joking? No. But I’m saying that from a biologist’s perspective: This way you become a nature’s gardener and a helper of environment.

Fruits are nice and juicy stuff that most of us would love to eat. Apart from the apparent function that fruits can be great in readily satisfying our stomach and quelling our thirst, they provide a significant amount of nutrients, including vitamins, sugar, and fibers, to human diet. It is self-evident that this category of foods plays a critical role in human lives. Actually, eating fruits is a culture so deeply rooted in humanity that they served as an immensely important food source among hunter-gathers whom we descend from.  But this is not the point I’m talking about.

This morning I was watching a documentary about elephants and their lives in central African tropical forests. I learned that elephants in this region spend a large amount time of the day browsing trees and cursorily eating their fruits. The animal’s poor digestion ensures that the seeds of many plant species they eat come out of their bodies intact and coated with fertilizers. Elephants thus unknowingly spread the seeds of immobile plants while browsing the landscape. In other words, they actually help disseminate plant seeds by eating fruits.

Realizing that this is one of those nature’s tricks raised in me a great admiration toward how nature evolves. Eating fruits doesn’t just benefit an animal’s body. Fruits of most species either have hard shell-protected seeds in their core or are studded with many tiny seeds embedded in their fleshy edible parts. Their seeds usually taste biter or dull, as we can attest, so animals often don’t eat these plant parts. In effect, fruit seeds are being liberated and spread when their more fleshy and tasty parts serve their eaters’ tongues and stomachs. This does the trick for both animals and plants: it increases survival (animals) and helps seed dissemination (plants). So this is yet another example of mutual benefits in interaction among species. As a result, species are bettered preserved and this unique form of species interaction confers an unlikely evolutionary advantage to both plant eaters and plants being eaten.

What an astonishing act of evolution in disguise! With limited sacrifice (giving up fruits), plants use animals as a vehicle to help propagate their genes.

Rigorous empirical evidence is needed, of course, to prove that this idea holds. But such ideas about how nature works have always amazed me and given me a deep gratifying feel than anything else since I was a child. Nature is the ultimate magician who has in its bag many more tricks, often hidden in mundane everyday lives, than you can ever discover. Plants do not grow fruits just to be eaten by animals. They need to be eaten as a way to preserve their genes. So next time when you eat a fruit, think that you are also a helper of plant genes. I hope this might make you find a natural course and feel even better (or destined) in eating those delicious fruits.

This is the original writing of Brid2011.

Please cite the source in explicit forms or write to the author for permission for any forms of reprint and the need to cite ideas expressed in this essay. All rights are reserved.

申明：此文及其所表述的观点是Brid2011 原创。如需应用本文及其其所表述的观点，请联系作者以获得许可。