This plant is explosive. It uses its seed-firing machine gun to colonize
huge empires and it has a poisonous fruit that can damage your deep soft tissue.
This plant is ready to go to war. It's the squirting cucumber,
Hi, I’m Tasha the Amazon and you’re watching Floralogic. Today we’re talking about one of
the most inappropriate-sounding plants in the world, the squirting cucumber.
At first sight Ecballium Elaterium, commonly known as the squirting or exploding cucumber
looks like your average flowering plant. This mediterranean cutie is part of the gourd family,
along with crowd favourites watermelons, pumpkins, and of course, cucumbers.
Can we pause for a moment to think about the fact that cucumbers and watermelons are gourds?!
The squirting cucumber has pretty little yellow flowers
and fuzzy fruits that vaguely resemble its edible namesake. Other members of its family
rely on animals to eat those fruits and disperse the seeds through their feces.
But squirting cucumbers take a slightly different approach. They spread their seeds
via one of the most dramatic dispersal methods in the world - they explode.
This is called Ballochory, and it works like this.
The squirting cucumber’s fruits have very soft cells that accumulate water to produce
osmotic pressures of up to 27 atmospheres. That’s about the same pressure you’d feel
if you were to dive 260 meters underwater. If the fruit is shaken and separated from
its stalk, it sets off a chain reaction that makes the cells expand and shoot out the seeds.
This is the famous squirt, and it makes the seeds fly up to six meters away from the plant.
Ok, let’s see that again, this time in slow motion.
You can see that the moment the fruit falls off, it just starts firing.
At the base of the fruit, there’s a hole where it broke off from the stem - that’s
where the seeds and the fluids shoot out of. There even seems to be a bit of recoil every
time it shoots. It’s really a seed gatling gun, like the Gatling Pea - zombies beware.
The only drawback is that it depends on water to build up pressure. So, in dry conditions
their ability to shoot out seeds is decreased. If all the seeds fall too close to the parent,
they might end up competing for resources. Every fruit can hold up to 60 seeds,
so one explosion is able to start a small colony. This form of seed dispersal is rare,
but effective and is used by several plants around the world.
This strategy has evolved independently in several plant families.
Some other examples are the dynamite tree, whose exploding fruits can be heard from a distance;
the Himalayan balsam, who’s seed pod explode spontaneously when they’re mature, and the witch
hazel, which has a squeezing mechanism that can shoot seeds out at 45 kilometers an hour.
In the squirting cucumber’s case, this seed dispersal method has helped them
colonize a huge mass of land, from central asia to the british isles.
If you’re one of the hundreds of millions of people that live in areas where these guys have
squirted their seeds, you might be able to watch the show up close.
Your best bet is to look for them in rocky or sandy ground near bodies of water.
They’ve also been observed at garbage dumps and construction sites. They flower in the summer
and fruits are at its largest in the fall. Historically, they were also used in folk
medicine, but more recently their usage has decreased
and their effectiveness has been questioned. There have been records of people using this plant
for thousands of years, going as far back as the ancient Asyrians. Their roots and fruits have
been used to make different concoctions that were supposed to combat pain, inflammation, cirrhosis,
hemorrhoids, and constipation. A study from the year 2000
showed that undiluted squirting cucumber juice causes irritation and inflammation
of mucous membranes. Some of the symptoms are vomiting, pink eye, and inability to swallow.
So, please, even though it looks like a natural version of pop rocks,
don’t put them anywhere near your mouth. They’re literally poison.
So what should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments and don’t forget to subscribe
for new episodes every week. Thanks for watching. See ya!