Free The Triumph of Seeds by Thor Hanson Page A

hundreds orperhaps thousands of miles. In that time, the endosperm continues to solidify, but enough coconut water remains to help the seed germinate when it finally washes up on some dry, sandy backshore. With its liquid endosperm keeping things moist inside, and the rich, oily copra providing energy, a young coconut can grow for weeks on end without any outside inputs. It’s not uncommon to see sprouted coconuts for sale as nursery stock in tropical markets, their bright young leaves already several feet tall.
    The coconut palm’s seafaring adaptations set it apart, but still fail to explain why its seeds need such an unusually rich, oily lunch.After all, starches or cocoa butter would float, too, if you packed them inside that giant, fibrous husk. My investigation of the almond led quickly to the same basic question. Domesticated from a Central Asian cousin of peaches, apricots, and plums, the almond tree spread first to the Mediterraneanand then around the world. People appreciated both its distinctive flavor and its nutritional value, because in addition to oil, an almond seed stores over 20 percent of its energy as pure protein. But why? What drove the evolution of such diverse seed nourishment strategies? Clearly, the answer to that question lay beyond what I could see in the remains of an Almond Joy. While I don’t need anyone’s help in eating candy bars, it was now apparent that I needed help understanding their biology. I decided it was time to contact someone whose name had cropped up again and again in my research, and whom more than one expert had described as a “god” in the world of seeds.
    “That question?” he said, laughing. “I always ask our doctoral students that question in their qualifying exams. So far no one has come up with the answer!”
    As a professor of botany at the University of Calgary and then the University of Guelph in Canada, Derek Bewley has been stumping students with seed questions for more than forty years. Luckily for everyone, his own research has provided many of the solutions. From development to dormancy to germination, the Bewley lab has explored all aspects of seed biology. But in spite of all these scholarly accomplishments, he told me his career had come as something of a surprise.
    “Green was not a color where we lived,” Bewley explained, recalling his childhood in the “smoky, dirty old town” of Preston, Lancashire. “We lived in what you would call a row home. There was no yard in front, and all we had in the back was a bit of concrete before the alley started.” Life might have turned out quite differently if Bewley’s grandfather hadn’t retired to the country, where he raised tomatoes and bred award-winning chrysanthemums and dahlias. Visiting granddad and watering those greenhouses became oneof Bewley’s “great joys as a child.” It sparked a passion for the green things of the world, and the seeds that produce them. That passion has produced hundreds of research papers and four books, including the seven-pound, eight-hundred-page Encyclopedia of Seeds , a constant companion to me in my own research. I knew I’d called the right person, but within a few minutes I also realized I wasn’t going to get a simple answer.
    “The evolution of this doesn’t seem to be logical,” he began, and told me how starches, oils, fats, proteins, and other energy strategies seem to be scattered at random across the plant kingdom. No one technique stands out as more advanced than another, since many recently evolved species store energy in the same basic ways as ancient ones. To make matters worse, seeds usually contain several different kinds of energy, and a mother plant might change the proportions based on variations in rainfall, soil fertility, or other growing conditions. Nor do plants in similar environments or with similar life histories necessarily rely on the same strategy. Grass seeds are notoriously starchy, but one of the most common weeds in a