Every year my maple trees drop a few thousand seeds, half of which seem to end up in my garden. I was just marveling at their clever design. The wing allows them to ride the wind and scatter themselves across several hundred square meters of ground. When one falls on a patch of disturbed soil, the wing then becomes a drill, vibrating when the wind touches it and so driving the business end of the seed into the ground, as in the picture below. I regularly see seeds that have been drive an inch (2.5 cm) into the soil in this way. It's quite marvelous, although it makes these quite annoying weeds.
Hebicopters, incidentally, is what one of our children called these seeds. We no longer have toddlers who mispronounce things in cute ways, but we remember, and still use some of the best.
Every year my maple trees drop a few thousand seeds, half of which seem to end up in my garden. I was just marveling at their clever design. The wing allows them to ride the wind and scatter themselves across several hundred square meters of ground. When one falls on a patch of disturbed soil, the wing then becomes a drill, vibrating when the wind touches it and so driving the business end of the seed into the ground, as in the picture below. I regularly see seeds that have been drive an inch (2.5 cm) into the soil in this way. It's quite marvelous, although it makes these quite annoying weeds.
Hebicopters, incidentally, is what one of our children called these seeds. We no longer have toddlers who mispronounce things in cute ways, but we remember, and still use some of the best.
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