AVOCADOS have become very popular over the last few years and that shouldn't come as a surprise. Its sweet yet almost savoury green flesh makes it an excellent ingredient in salads and sandwiches, and its sweet juice is both refreshing and healthy. Lauded as a superfood, it boasts a cavalcade of health benefits and it's jam-packed with nutrients, vitamins, fats and even protein. As wonderful a fruit as it is, some say that it actually has no business still being around and that it should have gone the way of the dodo a long time ago.
Is it true that avocados are supposed to be extinct?
Verdict:
MOST LIKELY TRUE
While there is no way to know for certain that avocados should have gone extinct, some studies suggest that without human intervention a long time ago, the avocado plant would have gone extinct.
Avocado plants are that plant world's version of a living fossil.
To understand why, we first have to look at why plants grow fruit in the first place.
While it would be nice to think that it's just a case of natural altruism, for plants growing fruit is actually very much transactional.
Plants want animals to eat their fruit and swallow the seed (or seeds) within it.
The hope is that the animal would then carry the seeds within them and then deposit them (along with a nice big daub of fertiliser) far away from the parent plant.
This would give the plant's seedlings the best chance at success as it would not need to compete with its parent for space, sunlight and other resources.
The thing is, the avocado fruit has a massive seed at the centre of its fruit.
It's so massive that no animal currently living in its homelands of Central and South America can swallow it whole.
However, if you turn back the clock far enough there was a time when those regions did have animals big enough to swallow avocado seeds whole, right up to about 10,000 years ago.
During the Pleistocene epoch (roughly 2.5 million years to 10,000 years ago), the Americas were practically crawling with huge beasts.
These range from giant Columbian mammoths that weighed as much as 10,000kg to huge giant sloths that stood up to 4m tall.
These megafauna were the avocado plants' chosen host for its seeds.
However, once our present epoch, the Holocene, rolled around the giant mammals of the Americas all went extinct.
Scientists are unsure what caused their extinction, but seeing that this was also around when humans migrated to the Americas, there's a high chance that we were the cause.
This should have been when avocados would have gone extinct as well as a major link in their reproductive cycle had been broken.
However, it's fairly obvious avocados have not gone extinct over the last 10,000 years and again, humans most likely played a big part in keeping the plant alive.
While it's true the big mammals are no longer around to help avocados spread their seed, but humans did develop a taste for the fruit and researchers believe we help the avocado stave off extinction.
References:
2. https://www.
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/
