Today the bright red, leathery-skinned, pulpy fruits of Trillium blaze in the
understory. Inside the fruits are the rock hard, ant-dispersed trillium seeds. Each seed has an external fatty deposit called the eliasome craved by foraging ants which carry the seeds back to the colony. Once the fatty eliasome is consumed the seed is discarded. Two years later it germinates in the ant's trash heap. As many as three years after that the new plant may flower for the first time.
John
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| Fruit of the Trillium |
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