northeast-flora-and-fauna

No, this isn't a post about the threat of zombie squirrels; it's just a regular old Eastern Gray Squirrel eating an Osage Orange (nicknamed "monkey brains"). My understanding is that squirrels will poke around in the (sticky, messy) Osage Orange fruit, eating the seeds while discarding the latexy flesh of the fruit. (There seems to be some Osage Orange debris on the ground near the squirrel.) I don't actually witness this very often though, perhaps because I'm not around Osage Orange trees most of the time. September 27, 2022 at Duke Farms Photo 248785674, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

Here's an Osage Orange fruit (sometimes described as "monkey brains") from last autumn. These are from smallish trees [1] native to parts of Texas but which have been introduced to other parts of the country. Having thorny branches/leaves, they were used similar to Multiflora Rose , as a "living fence". My guess is that the shrubby manifestations of Osage Orange made for a better fence than the tree manifestations. The Osage Orange is a large fruit that isn't eaten by a lot of animals today, and the main 2 that eat them around here (squirrels and deer) don't effectively spread their seeds [2]. This gives rise to speculation that seed dispersal used to be done by extinct megafauna. Other than making some logical sense, there's not really good evidence of an ecological connection between Osage Oranges and extinct megafauna. September 27, 2022 at Duke Farms Photo 248785697, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) [1] There's a bit of a fuz...