Happy Thought for 4 October 2024
Have a Happy Thought:
Here in the southern hemisphere, spring is starting to... well, spring. Longer days and warmer weather, as well as flowers and leaf buds and growing plants everywhere. So today I bring you two stories of seeds that have lasted the test of time.
One comes to us courtesy of Michigan State University and a team of scientists stretching back 145 years (yes you read that right). Basically, a professor in the late 19th century decided that it would be good to know how long seeds of various plants - mainly human food crops - could last as seeds, and still germinate. In other words, how long can we store future food as seeds?
So, he buried a bunch of seeds in a time capsule, and then dug them up a year later. He put a sample of seeds into dirt and water, and watched whether they would grow.
Many of them did.
So, he tried the same thing five years later. And then five years after that. By 1920, the original researcher had handed on the project, and his successor extended the period to 10 years. In 1980, the interval was extended to 20 years between experiments. 'Experiment' here means: In the dead of night, sneaking out to the burial place on campus, which is kept a strict secret to only a few professors and graduate students to make sure no one interferes with the seeds or the time capsule they are in; digging up the seeds and taking one of the original 20 buried bottles; covering over the site so no one can tell you were there; and trying to grow the seeds in the bottle you have now un-buried.
Image: Researchers digging up the bottle of seeds at nighttime. From https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajb2.16250
The last time such an experiment was carried out was in 2021 (it was supposed to be in 2020, but...), and...
Image: a 145-year-old bottle containing seeds. From https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajb2.16250
a bunch of seeds germinated! After close to a century and a half, in not-exactly-ideal-storage-conditions, and these seeds survived!
Image: flowers of Verbascum thapsus, grown from the bottle unearthed by the Beal seed experiment in 2021. From https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajb2.16250
There are four bottles remaining of the original 20 buried in 1879, so with nearly 80 years left to run, we may soon (or never!) find out how long seeds can last.
It's possible this whole Beal seed experiment will not tell us anything because of the second seed story I can share with you today.
Archaeologists found a seed in a desert cave, and botanists thought 'huh, I wonder if that will still grow?' So they put it in some nice soil and gave it water and... it germinated! Once the seed had broken out of its shell, they radio-carbon dated the shell, and determined that the seed itself was about 1,000 years old. Puts the 145-year-experiment into perspective.
The tree that grew from that seed is now about 12 years old, and botanists think they have finally confirmed the species, and that it was known and well-used by the peoples of that area for thousands of years.
Image: mature tree (12 years). by Mr Guy Eisne, from https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06721-5
Researching this led me down a few rabbit holes (by the way, did you know that rabbit holes, while very damaging to land and plants in some parts of the world, can actually help other plants to grow as the warrens turn over soil and aerate roots, as well as directly fertilising those roots?), including:
- the oldest known seeds to germinate were over 2,000 years old, and grew into date palms
- scientists have grown plants from fruits buried in the Siberian permafrost for 32,000 years
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