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MLB Network Verified account @MLBNetwork · 1h

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Give A Shit About Nature Verified account @giveashitnature · Jun 23

Oak trees have evolved a smart way to overwhelm the animals that eat acorns.

Every few years, across hundreds of miles, they drop a massive number of acorns all at once. The year before, almost nothing. The year after, almost nothing again.

It's called masting, and the strategy is brilliant. Squirrels, deer, blue jays, turkeys, and bears all eat acorns. If oaks produced a steady crop every year, the animals would maintain populations sized exactly to eat most of it. By producing almost nothing for several years and then flooding the forest floor all at once, the trees overwhelm the predators.

There are simply too many acorns for the animals to eat, and the surplus germinates into the next generation of oak trees. The ones that hoard and forget, squirrels especially, become inadvertent planters.

What's harder to explain is the synchrony. How do oaks across 700 kilometers coordinate the same decision in the same year?

The leading explanations involve shared weather cues, a specific temperature pattern in spring that acts as a trigger across the whole region, and possibly pollen coupling, where trees that need pollen from other trees synchronize flowering and, by extension, fruiting. Chemical signaling through the air or soil is a third hypothesis still being investigated.

None of these fully accounts for the scale. The trees aren't talking in any way we can intercept and understand. They're responding to the same world and arriving at the same answer, simultaneously, across a landscape larger than most countries.

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