Out of your gourd!

Fruits can best be defined as flowers at the stage of seed dispersal, and they all function to both protect and/or disperse seeds, more of one and less of the other depending upon the specific type of fruit. One of the ways in which humans have changed domesticated plants has been to select for bigger fruits. Natural selection would prevent plants from putting excess energy into rewarding fruits because of diminishing returns meaning that more fruit flesh would not disperse more seeds further, but since they are domestic and depending upon human intervention to reproduce, such wasted energy from the plant perspective is just what we want. And this is the time of year when human efforts to increase the size of fruits become very evident because pumpkins/squash, which are basically the same thing, have been selected to produce the largest fruits of all. This picture shows the Phactor admiring a 901 pound beast on display last year at the Great Pumpkin Patch in Arthur here in Lincolnland. But the all time grand champion was grown pumpkin, grown this year and on display at the New York Botanical Garden, is over twice as big at 1800+ pounds. The biggest one the Phactor has ever grown was a mere 150 lbs, and it was quite impressive; this year even zucchini didn’t grow well! Such huge pepos, the type of fruit, become flattened and deformed under their own weight, and naturally, well, naturally to an inquiring botanical mind, someone had to figure out how they managed not to simply burst open when they got so big. But why didn't they figure out how many pies this beast would make?