I am puzzled by brambles, raspberries and blackberries. They have sweet, juicy fruit, presumably so they will be eaten by animals who will spread their seeds. But they also have prickles. What’s the good of that?
• There is a simple solution to this conundrum of why brambles evolved to disperse their seeds in this way, yet appear to deter access with a barricade of thorns.
As the objective is to spread the seeds far and wide, the plants offer a mass of fruit of just the right size to be eaten by birds and small mammals such as rodents. The…
