Wildlife Photograph

Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut, Sometimes You Don't

Monday October 17, 2005
There are lots of nuts at Ijams Nature Center! Read why we love 'em.

With 90-degree temperatures and so little rain, it’s hard to believe fall is here, but that breeze through the blistering heat can hold the smell of autumn. The days are becoming shorter and cool mornings offer a preview of the coming days. Fall harvest for us often means apples, pumpkins, and winter squash, however, for those animals preparing for winter, fall harvest is a time of seeds and nuts.
Think about where plants come from and what it takes for them to begin to grow. Seeds and nuts are the beginning of that process. For clarification, and in case it comes up on Jeopardy, all nuts are seeds but not all seeds are nuts. Nuts are considered a fruit with a hard or leathery shell enclosing an edible kernel. While seeds are any flowering plants unit of reproduction capable of developing into another plant. Got it? Good. That will be on the final test. For the present we’ll talk of seeds and such.
Seeds are made up of several layers. There’s the seed coat; not surprisingly, it acts as a protective cover of the endosperm (seed food) and embryo. Then comes the cotyledons, this is the primary leaf that springs from the embryo as it is being fed from the endosperm. Before a seed can sprout forth its cotyledons and begin its journey (or continue its journey, considering everything is a cycle) it has to land in a suitable growing medium. That usually means soil, water or some combination of the two. The seed’s chemical messengers in its DNA send roots down and cotyledons up, usually. If you’ve ever planted a bulb upside down you know that the chemical messengers in bulbs don’t know up from down. Sounds like me some days. As a plant grows, produces more leaves and roots, gives off oxygen and takes in carbon dioxide, the initial seed containing seed coat, food and embryo goes away. But watch carefully as the plant produces a flower and eventually from those flowers new seeds. It’s not a process that attracts a lot of “ooohs” and “aahs”, but it is spectacular when you look around and see the results.

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