Location Taken: Port Angeles, Washington
Time Taken: June 2008
Mutants! There are mutants out there! Run around screaming! Aaaaaaaa!!!
…Ok, it’s a simple mutation. Just a case where a seed pod design that normally has two seeds instead has three. Not that big of a deal.
Well, perhaps.
The two-seed design is there for a reason, after all. I think of these as propeller seeds. When they fully mature, dry up, and detach from the tree, they spin around in the air like a propeller. It’s rather nifty to watch them spinning slowly towards the ground, hovering just a bit in the air.
That slow spin, mind you, lets the seeds spread further away from their parent tree than they would have if they’d just let gravity do its thing. Which means any that manage to root themselves and start growing won’t be competing directly with the parent, and might have even found a good clearing. Which means the plants with the propellers do just a bit better than they would have otherwise.
I don’t know how well a three-seed propeller would work. It might not spin right, might just fall straight down. There it would languish in the shade cast by its parent. Or perhaps it might be just a bit better, though the extra weight along argues against it. But if it is, and it manages to prosper, perhaps this small mutation is the start of a new breed of three-seed propellers.
If you think about it, mutations are neither inherently bad or good. Sure, some are obviously bad, like one that makes a plant stop growing seeds entirely, and some are solidly good, like a different fur pattern that just happens to be a perfect camouflage, but the whole concept of mutation is neutral. They just are, these small variances in the genetic code, and the good ones make rolling the dice for each generation worth it.
