itās crazy to me that every seed in existence is a little chemical computer taking readings of temperature and moisture and minerals and all that to see if itās able to grow yet and theyāre doing crazy stuff like going into full dormancy and waiting for species-specific conditions etc etc and some seeds will do this in the size of a dust particle (see: orobanche) and some will pack in extra starch and food and do it in the size of a coconut or somethingā¦ just dissected this flower seed at work that was a woody two-compartment capsule with one embryo per compartment, the whole seed a little smaller than a dime, and I swear to god it had a full soybeanās worth of embryo and food packed in there. itās just unfathomable to me
sometimes a seed strikes me as being like a little spaceship with on-board life support and stuff. all thatās inherently certain about a seedās existence is that its parents survived nearby, presumably, so if all goes well itāll be set up for some kind of success falling where it falls, but ideally the seed wonāt see those exact conditions, because being too close could also hurt the seedās chances of survivalā¦ as could being too far away, like if it ends up in a different habitat or ecosystem and the right conditions never happen. The whole food-on-board strategy was a huge buff when they patched it in after ferns and other spore-bearing plants, but itās still basically outer space, right? Just deploying a hundred ships to different planets in the same star system, hoping itās not so different down there that itās unsurvivable? like every seed is a chance and different plants are putting different amounts of food, effort, and strategy into those chances. so you get a million different seeds from a million different species and they all look and act different from the ground up. you know what I mean, man. you know what Iām sayin
