What eats Osage oranges?
A. Osage oranges, the fruit of the Osage-orange tree, aren’t in fact oranges. Maybe you remember that from last week or the week before. And while people eat Osage orange relatives — the fibery fig, the tasty mulberry, the giant green tropical breadfruit, the just as green and even gianter (as big as a watermelon!) tropical jackfruit — they don’t eat Osage oranges. The flesh is said to be bitter. I haven’t tried it myself. It’s not super-poisonous — a plus — but still might make you puke — a minus. Animal-wise, deer, birds, horses and squirrels, to name a few, have been seen eating Osage oranges, either the flesh or the seeds inside. But experts disagree on how much the animals actually eat, how often they do it and even if they do it at all. Know what else ate Osage oranges? Big extinct North American animals such as mammoths, ground sloths and mastodons. In doing it they helped spread the seeds around. OK, enough about Osage oranges. Seedily, Twig P.S. Scientists call it “seed disper
