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Interesting Facts about seeds

With us being close to the end of the week, our brains are tired, were looking forward to the weekend and in need of some mental stimulation. Here are some facts, figures; challenges and general fun to keep us all occupied for one more day and this week it’s all to do with seeds.

The seeds from an orchid are incredibly small. It takes roughly 1.3 million seeds to tip the scales above 1g.

A single ragweed plant can release up to as many as a billion grains of pollen

A single drift seed from the Marys bean plant, found in very specific parts of the south Mexico and Central America rainforests was once found in Norway, that’s 15,000 miles away!

One of the world’s deadliest toxins comes the seeds of the castor bean. Ricin is 6,000 times more poisonous than cyanide and 12,000 times more poisionous than rattlesnake venom. 0.000015g of ricin, that’s about the same as the weight of a seed head, is enough to kill a 160 pound person.

Seeds from certain berries are dispersed by mechanical dispersal, a forcible ejection of the seeds away from the plant. In Dwarf mistletoe there is enough hydrostatic pressure built up to fire the 3mm seeds up to 15m laterally with an initial speed of around 62 mph!

Riddle

On one side of the river, a farmer has a chicken, a fox, and a bag of seeds. He needs to get them to the other side of the river, but he can only take one at a time. The problem is, if he takes the fox and leaves the chicken with the seeds, the chicken will eat the seeds. If he takes the seeds and leave the animals alone, the fox will eat the chicken. So how does he get all three over intact?

(Highlight the text below to see the answer)

A:  First take over the chicken. Come back and take over the seeds, leave the seeds and take the chicken back. Now take the fox back to the seeds and finally go back across to bring the chicken!