SSS 2012-06-15

（单词翻译）

 Plants that use animals to disperse¹ their seeds can find themselves in a pickle². Their need to make fruit tasty enough to entice³ the local fauna⁴, but they also need to make sure that their animal assistants don't digest the very seeds they are meant to dispread. In Israel Negev Desert, a plant called Sweet M came up with the distasteful strategy. (Creature) called spiny⁵ mice feed on M. They love the fruit, but they hate the seeds. And so they spit them out all over the place, just as the plant planned, not a increate to the study in the journal Current Biology. Sweet M produces little blackberries that helds about twenty seeds at a piece. Inside those seeds, there are enzyme⁶. When a berry chumping mouse crashes the seed, the enzyme freed up to produce compounds that tasts like hot mustard. Hence, better leaving through chemistry. Researchers armed with video cameras observe the mouse spitting the pits like kids eating water melons on a summer day. Nearly three quaters of the (spit-so) seeds landed intact. And they actually germinated⁷ twice as fast as the seeds taken directly from the fruit itself. It likes a Dickens book: Great Expectarations.