Avian food

Usage examples of seeds.

Experimental studies in which botanists have collected seeds from such natural stands of wild cereals, much as hunter-gatherers must have been doing over 10,000 years ago, show that annual harvests of up to nearly a ton of seeds per hectare can be obtained, yielding 50 kilocalories of food energy for only one kilocalorie of work expended.

By collecting huge quantities of wild cereals in a short time when the seeds were ripe, and storing them for use as food through the rest of the year, some hunting-gathering peoples of the Fertile Crescent had already settled down in permanent villages even before they began to cultivate plants.

It has consisted in always cultivating the best-known variety, sowing its seeds, and, when a slightly better variety chanced to appear, selecting it, and so onwards.

While size and tastiness are the most obvious criteria by which human hunter-gatherers select wild plants, other criteria include fleshy or seedless fruits, oily seeds, and long fibers.

Teosinte's value as food would not have impressed hunter-gatherers: it was less productive in the wild than wild wheat, it produced much less seed than did the corn eventually developed from it, and it enclosed its seeds in inedible hard coverings.

As a result, hunter-gatherers could move up a mountainside harvesting grain seeds as they matured, instead of being overwhelmed by a concentrated harvest season at a single altitude, where all grains matured simultaneously.

Others, such as pulses and members of the mustard family, have toxic seeds, but the toxins are easily removed, leaving the seeds edible.

One is that radiocarbon dating until the 1980s required relatively large amounts of carbon (a few grams), much more than the amount in small seeds or bones.

Poppy seeds are absent from excavated sites of the earliest farming communities in eastern Europe and Southwest Asia.

To achieve that goal, they plant many different seeds or roots, select the best progeny and plant their seeds, apply knowledge of genetics to develop good varieties that breed true, and perhaps even use the latest techniques of genetic engineering to transfer specific useful genes.

It may come as a surprise to learn that plant seeds can resist digestion by your gut and nonetheless germinate out of your feces.

The seeds of many wild plant species actually must pass through an animal's gut before they can germinate.

When strawberry seeds are still young and not yet ready to be planted, the surrounding fruit is green, sour, and hard.

When the seeds finally mature, the berries turn red, sweet, and tender.

Naturally, strawberry plants didn't set out with a conscious intent of attracting birds when, and only when, their seeds were ready to be dispersed.