TELL ME ALL ABOUT THE SEXY AVOCADOES

animate-mush:

Hahahaha okay well it’s been awhile but basically

Plant flowers usually have both male and female parts.  Some plants go so far as to have male and female flowers.  Avocadoes are one of these.  But the thing with avocadoes is they don’t have them both at the same time.  Usually you don’t want to pollinate yourself because ceiling-cat is watching  because the whole point of sexual reproduction is to introduce genetic diversity into the population.  So most avocadoes can’t actually self-pollinate because the male and female flowers don’t co-occur.  

Now, the simplest way to do this would be to just have male and female trees.  BUT NO.  You could also have male and female flowers that are simply open at different times of day.  But even that is too pedestrian for avocadoes.  Their flowers actually change from female to male over the course of the day and back.  For some reason.  Which means that in order to every get avocadoes every, you need at least two trees on opposing cycles.  

The gwen avocado, developed at UC Riverside, was one of the first self-pollinating avocadoes, developed specifically for home gardens.  Also gwen avocadoes are frickin delicious.  

The other thing about avocadoes is …what would you think their distribution method in nature would be?  With those huge pits?  And the answer is: mammoth droppings.  Yes.  Avocadoes are designed for fecal distribution via extinct megafauna.  Which is why prior to human cultivation, they ended up confined to an absolutely tiny geographic area, since the creatures that were meant to spread their seeds around the countryside no longer existed.

So basically, the sex life of an avocado involves cycling between male and female and desperately waiting for that special someone who is doing the same thing only backwards, and then crying because mammoths are extinct.