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Saw a thing that said one oak tree can drop 10,000 acorns in a good year and now I can't stop thinking about it
I was reading a nature pamphlet at the botanical garden in St. Louis two weeks ago, mostly killing time while my wife looked at the succulents, and it said a single mature oak can put out around 10,000 acorns in a heavy year. I stood there doing the math on my fingers like an idiot. Ten thousand. From one tree. And then it hit me that oaks don't even do this every year, they do what the pamphlet called a mast year, sometimes skipping two or three years in between. So here's my argument with myself. One side says this is just nature being wasteful and random, throwing out way more seeds than any forest could ever grow. The other side says no, it's a plan, because if you flood the woods with food, the squirrels and deer and jays can't eat them all, so a few acorns survive. I see it both ways honestly. But then I got stuck on a third thing, which is that my neighbor's big red oak in our old neighborhood in Springfield dropped so many one fall that my mower choked out twice, and I never once thought about it as a survival move. Just raked and complained. So which is it, dumb luck or a real plan? And does anybody know if a tree somehow knows it's a mast year, or does it just happen and nobody's driving?
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pat_coleman2d ago
Whoa, hard disagree, that's just luck, not a plan.
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