I feel like I’ve been used. There I was, minding my own business, innocently taking a walk in the park when I suddenly realized I was being exploited. I looked down and gasped in horror.
I am referring, of course, to the insidious practice of propagation epizoochory! Perhaps you know this by its other name: getting-plastered-with-burrs. Generally, I am happy to cooperate with Nature. Symbiosis makes the world go round. When aardvarks in South Africa eat desert melons for their water content, they bury their poo (containing seeds) near their burrows, (some animals never learned not to—you know—where they eat) the seeds are fertilized and sprout and the aardvarks have a continuous supply of melons. Win, win. Live and let live, I say. This even goes for weeds. But some weeds go too far. For burrs, it’s all about them. They think everybody should help them distribute their seeds and they don’t care how annoying they are. Burrs are the jerks of the plant world.
Instead of being symbiotic, burrs are opportunistic. Your soft, white, fluffy poodle cuts across a patch of weeds and emerges as prickly as a sea urchin. This system works out great for the burdock plant. While you painstakingly pluck off the burrs and drop them on the ground or in the trash, they are transported to new and exciting locations, eventually creating new burr family trees. And what does your poodle get out the whole experience? Nothing.
Well, maybe human have gotten something out of our interaction with burrs. In 1941, George de Mestral, a Swiss electrical engineer had been out hunting in the woods and came home with nothing to show for the effort but a dog covered with burdock seeds. As he was carefully removing the stickers, George, being a scientific type, stopped to examine one of the things under a magnifying glass to see what makes them so hard to remove. He noticed that burrs contain tiny hooks that grab onto fur and fabric. He began to experiment with two strips of cloth covered with little hooks and loops and—you guessed it—Velrco was born, liberating new generations of children from ever having to tie their shoes again. (If you ever wondered where the name “Velcro” comes from, it’s a combination of “velvet” and “crochet”—like in crochet hooks. They could have named it “burr cloth”. Or just “rip” after the sound it makes.)
Burrs are biologically successful only because they are so irritating. If animals and even people didn’t mind being covered in prickly, scratchy seeds and never bothered to pick them off, allowing them to spread, the burdock plant might have died out. Burrs could have evolved to be nice like milkweeds or dandelions with their pretty soft parachute seeds or maple trees with their fun propeller seeds. But no, burrs evolved to be the spoiler of wool socks, the tormentor of Angora cats. They hitchhike on us without so much as a “howdy-do”. I don’t care if Velcro is easier—I’m sticking with shoelaces.