this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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So, it's more interesting than this. The trees are playing the squirrels. There's a normal amount of acorns that can support a normal amount of squirrels. But once every few years, the trees make a bunch more acorns. More than the normal amount of squirrels can eat. But not frequent enough that the number of squirrels increase. So the squirrels go crazy and hide em everywhere that year, but there's no way they can eat them all, so there are a bunch of acorns planted.
Tldr: trees manipulate # of acorns to get squirrels to plant more.
It's amazing nature found this blindly and it was the most efficient way to propagate as a species.
It was a good enough* way to propagate as a species
Local minimum, not a global minimum. Evolution is one long autoregressive process.
I just learned two new words
The squirrel population booms during these drop years and then starve off the years after as the normal amount of drops return.