Cannabis Seeds Transported by Birds?

[Gram Paw smurf]

well you didn't just ask if ppl thaught it was possible though you kind of asked if it could be considered an evolutionary reason for the resin being there in the 1st place.
Is a big difference between the 2 questions, n many have said it's possible to happen, but doesn't seem many think it's a reason for it being there.

cheers,.................................................gps

 

[Only Ornamental]

@GPS Exactly!

 

[Emil Muzz]

@GPS

Could the trichomes on the calyx when ruptured by foraging animals cause disarticulated seeds to stick to the animals and then be distributed, is this part of the reason for resin?

Not entirely related to the article, but a thought...

I don't believe it is the only reason for resin. I believe cannabis has developed resin in relation many evolutionary pressures. Cannabis resin has microbicidal properties; protects the ovule from desication by creating a favourable humidity; provides protection from UV light; gaurds against insect attack; provides medically and recreationally valuable cannabinoids for humans.

I think this is one more reason for cannabis developing and following this evolutionary strategy.

 

[Only Ornamental]

... I believe cannabis has developed resin in relation many evolutionary pressures. Cannabis resin has microbicidal properties; protects the ovule from desication by creating a favourable humidity; provides protection from UV light; gaurds against insect attack; provides medically and recreationally valuable cannabinoids for humans.

I think this is one more reason for cannabis developing and following this evolutionary strategy.

Apart from the reason 'medically and recreationally valuable cannabinoids for humans' and IMHO the 'glue theory', you're likely dead right.
Because wild cannabis is known (e.g. aka ruderalis) and that one also exhibits stickiness I don't think that humans contributed much to the evolution of its glands per se but certainly had their hands all over medical/recreational varieties but not with regard to stickiness but flavour, high etc. On the other hand, stickiness of fibre hemp has always been a problem because the resin clogs the machines; that's why humans 'reversed' evolution creating Santhica varieties which produce nearly no resin anymore .

And one more argument against your 'glue theory': I know of no plant which uses 'glue' for seed distribution. Although, plants widely use the 'Velcro approach' in a hundred different nuances and employed 'glue' for targeted pollen distribution.

 

[offthehook]

I don't believe in the theory as stated by OP. From my observations it just does not seem to happen like that. Birds are pretty pitch perfect about their table manners and know real well how to separate a seed from it's casing without getting em stuck to their feathers.

I do know for a fact that Pigeons will digest Cannabis seeds completely and none of them will still be viable after being turned into Pigeon shit.

What I do know for a fact is that if Pigeons eat a bunch of seed, try to digest them in their crop and get caught by a Hawk, The Hawk will only eat the meat but not the seeds, intestines and feathers.
In this situation there is now a shit load of feathers and intestine-sludge surrounding the seed which could act as a potential fertilizer for the still viable seed.

I also know for a fact that if Pigeons get certain types of throat deceases, they will still try to eat, but vomit the still viable seed out again.

When Pigeons feed their between 2 and 3 weeks old young, they will puke up the still viable seed from their crop and occasionally some seed will be spilled.

(Former Pigeon breeder and Hawk sanctuary worker here.)

Ps. Some feno's of near THC free, industrial Finola hemp can be as sticky as anything else.

 

[Emil Muzz]

And one more argument against your 'glue theory': I know of no plant which uses 'glue' for seed distribution.Although, plants widely use the 'Velcro approach' in a hundred different nuances and employed 'glue' for targeted pollen distribution.

Mistletoe has naturally sticky seeds...

"Reproduction & Dispersal: Mistletoe has male and female plants - the female plants produce the white berries that are so distinctive. Both plants produce small, green flowers, which are found at the tips of the branches from January to March. They are pollinated by small insects. Mistletoe is spread by the birds that feed on the berries - many birds do not recognise white berries as food, but mistletoe 'specialists' include the mistle thrush and the blackcap. The former spread the mistletoe seeds in their droppings, while the latter eat the berries and then smear their beaks on tree branches, depositing the seed."

 

[Emil Muzz]

I don't believe in the theory as stated by OP. From my observations it just does not seem to happen like that. Birds are pretty pitch perfect about their table manners and know real well how to separate a seed from it's casing without getting em stuck to their feathers.

I do know for a fact that Pigeons will digest Cannabis seeds completely and none of them will still be viable after being turned into Pigeon shit.

What I do know for a fact is that if Pigeons eat a bunch of seed, try to digest them in their crop and get caught by a Hawk, The Hawk will only eat the meat but not the seeds, intestines and feathers.
In this situation there is now a shit load of feathers and intestine-sludge surrounding the seed which could act as a potential fertilizer for the still viable seed.

I also know for a fact that if Pigeons get certain types of throat deceases, they will still try to eat, but vomit the still viable seed out again.

When Pigeons feed their between 2 and 3 weeks old young, they will puke up the still viable seed from their crop and occasionally some seed will be spilled.

(Former Pigeon breeder and Hawk sanctuary worker here.)

Ps. Some feno's of near THC free, industrial Finola hemp can be as sticky as anything else.

In my experience wild pigeons, starlings and sparrows descend in flocks into fruit trees and bushes and the birds will compete with each other for the food. They really fight with each other-especially sparrows- I've had branches broken on fruit trees and bushes by feeding birds.

From this I can imagine a cannabis plant being broken up,flowers torn and seeds spilled by birds competing for food; seeds still with calyx or birds being smeared with resin due to the ruckus of feeding around them will allow seeds to attach and travel on them. This on top of the birds pecking the seeds free from the sticky flowers putting resin on their beaks allowing seeds to attach.

 

[CalabrianSkunkX]

This is an example of a seed transport by a bird! It's the "bi-albero della felicità" translated "double-tree of happiness"
This is a "a tree in a tree", maybe a bird dropped a cherry pit into a trunk of a mulberry tree.
When in spring cherry blossoms is beautiful to see
PS: It is in italy, in Piemonte!


Sorry my bad Englishhh

 

[Only Ornamental]

Mistletoe has naturally sticky seeds...

Thanks, completely forgot mistletoe... still not convinced enough .

Yea, sparrows make a mess; usually half the seeds of the birdhouse are spilled everywhere within minutes and the titmice can pick their share from the ground.

@offthehook: I learned the thing with non-digested seeds and pigeons in ornithology class way back.

 

[Emil Muzz]

This is an example of a seed transport by a bird! It's the "bi-albero della felicità" translated "double-tree of happiness"
This is a "a tree in a tree", maybe a bird dropped a cherry pit into a trunk of a mulberry tree.
When in spring cherry blossoms is beautiful to see
PS: It is in italy, in Piemonte!

View attachment 273788
Sorry my bad Englishhh

Lovely picture and very interesting to know.
Your English is far better than my Italian I can only ask for bus tickets:/ lol.

 

[Hammerhead]

There's a few types of seeds that are vertically indestructible by birds digestive system. I know I have read about birds distributing seeds in the crap. I cant tell ya what type of bird it was or what type of seeds.


I did find some basic info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_dispersal
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/adaptations/Seed_dispersal

 

[palmero]

Bird Gut Boosts Wild Chili Seed Survival
from
http://www.insidescience.org/content/bird-gut-boosts-wild-chili-seed-survival/1176

After birds eat a wild chili pepper, more seeds grow.
Originally published:
Jul 15 2013 - 4:00pm
By:
Ranjini Raghunath, ISNS Contributor
(ISNS) -- When a South American bird eats a certain wild chili pepper, its gut changes the seeds in ways that may improve the seeds' chances of growing into new pepper plants, a new study suggests.

Seeds of the wild chili plant Capsicum chacoense that passed through the gut of the Small-billed Elaenia had fewer pathogens and ant-attracting chemical cues, giving them a 370 percent increase in survival rate, according to Evan Fricke, a graduate student at the University of Washington, in Seattle.

Native to Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay, C. chacoense -- the plant in the study -- produces spicy, red-colored peppers. The Small-billed Elaenia commonly grazes on the peppers, and after digesting them, disperses the seeds around the environment giving the peppers an opportunity to flourish. But the peppers do face a few challenges to survival. Insects can pass fungal infections to the seeds, and ants can pick up and presumably eat the seeds after they are dispersed.

The study, published in the journal Ecology Letters, tested for three factors that could affect the seeds' survival: chemicals from the seeds that attract ants, the seeds' distance from the parent plant, and the seeds' fungal load -- the amount of fungal infection on the seed's outer covering.

They found that seeds that passed through a bird's digestive system had a 31 percent lower fungal load in lab tests and were twice as likely to survive in natural field conditions as unprocessed seeds that were taken directly from the pepper.

Ants picked up the bird-processed seeds only half as many times as unprocessed seeds in the first two days, after which the removal rates were almost identical. The researchers believe that unprocessed seeds emit volatile chemicals that make them more attractive to local ants, while the bird's gut "conditions" the other set of seeds, changing their characteristics and making them less attractive.

Ants removed both sets of seeds at similar rates after the first couple of days, but initially the seeds that the birds processed were ignored by ants in favor of unprocessed seeds. That initial edge seemed to boost the final number of processed seeds that germinated, according to Fricke.

"At the very end, it is still a doubling of survival," he said.

The researchers also tested the assumption that seeds far away from the parent fare better, as ants tend to concentrate near the parent plant where more seeds fall.

In their experiments, however, they found that distance did little to reduce the seeds' removal rate. In fact, the farther away the seeds were from their parent plant, the higher chance they had of being eaten by the ants. One of the reasons, Fricke guessed, could be "predator satiation" -- a phenomenon in which the ants become "full" quickly when too many seeds fall near the parent, giving the seeds a sort of safety-in-numbers advantage.

Scientists have studied plant-bird interactions for decades, trying to address how plants benefit from the relationship, Fricke said. "It's fairly easy to answer from the birds' side: they're getting dinner out of it. The main goal was to figure out all the ways the bird was benefiting the plant."

The study has "important implications for understanding the complexity of the interactions between seed dispersers and the plants," according to Eugene Schupp, an ecologist at Utah State University, in Logan, who was not involved with the research.

People have studied the effect of the digestive process on seed germination rates before, but not on seed removal by ants or mortality due to fungi as this study did, Schupp added.

The next step is to see if other plants have similar mechanisms for conditioning and protecting their seeds that the chili peppers employ through the Small-billed Elaenia's gut.

"They [the birds] certainly seem to be extremely important in this chili pepper, and could potentially be important in other dispersal systems as well," Schupp said.

 

[siftedunity]

Thanks, completely forgot mistletoe... still not convinced enough .

Yea, sparrows make a mess; usually half the seeds of the birdhouse are spilled everywhere within minutes and the titmice can pick their share from the ground.

@offthehook: I learned the thing with non-digested seeds and pigeons in ornithology class way back.

there's no need to be convinced, its scientific fact.
read up on zoochoryor epizoochory.
and one comment you made about wild cannabis not being as resinous is untrue, there's a reason why people still go and collect seeds from wild plants. Go to Afghanistan and see how resinous they grow in the wild. obviously selectively bred domestic strains are gonna be on the top end of the stickiness spectrum but thats to be expected.

its obviously viable that seeds stuck to a bird s feathers might be distributed around. even if its not far, it doesn't really matter. if it falls off 10 feet away, it has still done its job.

I wouldn't think that its the main way they are spread around but definitely a possibility. im pretty sure resin is multifunctional.
theres so many different factors involved as well, people have been mentioning pigeons, but in all fairness a pigeon probably couldn't even land on a bud, they are hardly an agile bird. most of them feed off the ground. there might be some birds which wont digest cannabis seeds.

 

[Only Ornamental]

there's no need to be convinced, its scientific fact.
read up on zoochoryor epizoochory.
and one comment you made about wild cannabis not being as resinous is untrue, there's a reason why people still go and collect seeds from wild plants. Go to Afghanistan and see how resinous they grow in the wild. obviously selectively bred domestic strains are gonna be on the top end of the stickiness spectrum but thats to be expected.

its obviously viable that seeds stuck to a bird s feathers might be distributed around. even if its not far, it doesn't really matter. if it falls off 10 feet away, it has still done its job.

I wouldn't think that its the main way they are spread around but definitely a possibility. im pretty sure resin is multifunctional.
theres so many different factors involved as well, people have been mentioning pigeons, but in all fairness a pigeon probably couldn't even land on a bud, they are hardly an agile bird. most of them feed off the ground. there might be some birds which wont digest cannabis seeds.

You misunderstand me. I don't believe that eventual (coincidental IMO) seeds glued with resin to an animal for dispersal has contributed to the evolution of resin stickiness and I don't even think it very likely that this mechanism really contributes to seed dispersal (maybe a one in a million... which could be the one that dropped on the secluded island LoL).
I never said that wild hemp isn't resiny, just that some Dutch and Cali Hybrids are way more sticky than wild HEMP (not wild drug type or multipurpose cannabis).

The main problem I see with the OP's dispersal hypothesis is that the plant as a whole would have to make the 'vector' (animal) sticky and rely upon the animal to brush off a ripe seed with the 'glued' fur/feather. The common mechanism (not imperatively the only) is that the seeds/fruits (shell, husk etc. included) themselves stick directly to the vector.
Imagine wild hemp maybe 100'000 years in the past... neither a dense industrial hemp field nor a nice drug plantation but single plants growing here and there on a clearing or in a dry streambed. How the heck are they supposed to get the animal sticky all over and then glue the seeds on them without making them freak out first? There's maybe some deer dumb enough to graze on the plant and get it's head full of resin but even if the plant gets the deer to distribute the seeds there's likely not much of an evolutionary advantage in such a strategy. Develop resin to avoid the deer eating the seeded buds though...
Which brings me to the pigeons: They're just an example of birds swallowing whole grains. Finches for example peel their seeds/nuts first and hence won't participate much in hemp seed dispersal. You may be right that a common pigeon gets in trouble trying to land on a hemp plant... but a common ground dove or other small American doves (for me, a dove and a pigeon are the same due my mothers tongue, sorry) could certainly do the trick . And because their feathers are their most precious thing, they won't get it dirty all over.

Gotta go...

 

[offthehook]

Quote by Only Ornamental. @offthehook: I learned the thing with non-digested seeds and pigeons in ornithology class way back.
______________________________________________________________________________________

That will most certainly be true for several variety of fruit eating pigeons, but I forgot to mention I was talking about the regular city and hobby Pigeons (Columba Livia)
They will digest all cannabis seeds wholy and none of them will survive their digestion tract. Not even one ever.

But a variety of fruit eating pigeon may swallow a berry and disperse their seeds as a natural means for it to propagate. yes.

 

[Only Ornamental]

Originally I meant 'city' pigeons (most do when speaking of pigeons) when taking them as an example of 'stomach chewing' birds and it got stuck...

It was suuuuch a long time ago I can't even remember which pigeons/doves we discussed back in ornithology class. I did indeed wonder about the 'city' pigeons and seeds... never saw pigeon poop with seeds in it and there's plenty crap all over the cities. Thought maybe it's because they eat mainly bread crumbs here around cause folks still believes that old bread's good for birdies... maybe it's because they in truth digest the whole city waste they ingest and only the little doves disperse seeds . Thanks for the clarification.

 

[Jhhnn]

Originally I meant 'city' pigeons (most do when speaking of pigeons) when taking them as an example of 'stomach chewing' birds and it got stuck...

It was suuuuch a long time ago I can't even remember which pigeons/doves we discussed back in ornithology class. I did indeed wonder about the 'city' pigeons and seeds... never saw pigeon poop with seeds in it and there's plenty crap all over the cities. Thought maybe it's because they eat mainly bread crumbs here around cause folks still believes that old bread's good for birdies... maybe it's because they in truth digest the whole city waste they ingest and only the little doves disperse seeds . Thanks for the clarification.

Rock pigeons' origins are as obscure as that of cannabis. City pigeons are the descendants of domesticated pigeons, feral populations like feral housecats. Nobody really understands the origins of housecats, either.

I suspect that's also true for nearly all the "wild" cannabis in the world, too. It's not "wild" the same way that African elephants are wild. It's "feral", and there is a difference. It possesses qualities selected by farmers over thousands of years, resin production obviously one of them.

I don't think resin has to do with animal dispersal so much as it's about protecting the seeds for timely dispersal, about being part of the structure of calyxes. I don't know of any scientific work done to document the changing state of cannabis seed heads over the course of an Afghani winter or the dry season in Colombia to explain the timing of seed dispersal or how changes to the calyxes play into that. Nobody I've ever known let their outdoor crop stand through the winter to find out, either.

 

[siftedunity]

Quote by Only Ornamental. @offthehook: I learned the thing with non-digested seeds and pigeons in ornithology class way back.
______________________________________________________________________________________

That will most certainly be true for several variety of fruit eating pigeons, but I forgot to mention I was talking about the regular city and hobby Pigeons (Columba Livia)
They will digest all cannabis seeds wholy and none of them will survive their digestion tract. Not even one ever.

But a variety of fruit eating pigeon may swallow a berry and disperse their seeds as a natural means for it to propagate. yes.

I would imagine it depends on how strong the digestive acids were etc.. im sure theres birds which pass some seeds through.

 

[Matthew Harvey]

haha, interesting

 

[siftedunity]

You misunderstand me. I don't believe that eventual (coincidental IMO) seeds glued with resin to an animal for dispersal has contributed to the evolution of resin stickiness and I don't even think it very likely that this mechanism really contributes to seed dispersal (maybe a one in a million... which could be the one that dropped on the secluded island LoL).
I never said that wild hemp isn't resiny, just that some Dutch and Cali Hybrids are way more sticky than wild HEMP (not wild drug type or multipurpose cannabis).

The main problem I see with the OP's dispersal hypothesis is that the plant as a whole would have to make the 'vector' (animal) sticky and rely upon the animal to brush off a ripe seed with the 'glued' fur/feather. The common mechanism (not imperatively the only) is that the seeds/fruits (shell, husk etc. included) themselves stick directly to the vector.
Imagine wild hemp maybe 100'000 years in the past... neither a dense industrial hemp field nor a nice drug plantation but single plants growing here and there on a clearing or in a dry streambed. How the heck are they supposed to get the animal sticky all over and then glue the seeds on them without making them freak out first? There's maybe some deer dumb enough to graze on the plant and get it's head full of resin but even if the plant gets the deer to distribute the seeds there's likely not much of an evolutionary advantage in such a strategy. Develop resin to avoid the deer eating the seeded buds though...
Which brings me to the pigeons: They're just an example of birds swallowing whole grains. Finches for example peel their seeds/nuts first and hence won't participate much in hemp seed dispersal. You may be right that a common pigeon gets in trouble trying to land on a hemp plant... but a common ground dove or other small American doves (for me, a dove and a pigeon are the same due my mothers tongue, sorry) could certainly do the trick . And because their feathers are their most precious thing, they won't get it dirty all over.

Gotta go...

everywhere cannabis grows wild today, it is in vast numbers covering hillsides etc rather than solitary plants and it relies on wild pollination also..

id don't believe that the evolution of sticky resin is a purely result of seeds sticking to animals or plants, but its a possibility that it is part of it.

one other thing which is worth considering, is that female cannabis plants are very prone to producing male flowers. could it be that this survival mechanism has evolved because seeds are sometimes spread very far from others? as its pretty unlikely that a plant would need to do that unless the seeds were spread very far away from other cannabis plants. and since plants cant spread their own seeds that far, it must surely be down to animals.
I wouldn't think it would be birds though, I would imagine it would be mammals spreading them. you guys must have trimmed before and got calyx's stuck to your clothes? imagine if you were a deer, and that calyx had a seed inside? that would be carried well away and dropped off somewhere else..