Could sweet and hot peppers come from the same plant?
One of the veggies that my Keplerians grow is peppers. I have heard of some sweet peppers cross pollinating with hot peppers making the sweet peppers hotter and the hot peppers sweeter. However that involves a minimum of 2 plants. 1 per type of pepper.
So I was wondering if it is plausible for a single plant to produce both sweet and hot peppers.
I think it would be in 1 of 2 ways.
Either the plant produces 2 types of flowers, 1 for sweet peppers and 1 for hot peppers and those different flowers attract different pollinators.
Or once the plant reaches a certain stage it will transition from 1 type to another. Some might produce hot peppers first and then start producing sweet peppers and others might do just the opposite. This could still involve 2 types of flowers but only one type being produced at any given point.
Is it plausible that a single plant could produce both hot and sweet peppers?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/104570. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
This could serve as a defense mechanism. Fruits are designed so that there's plenty of sugar for the seed when it grows, which gives it a better chance at survival. Even when an animal eats the fruit, if it eats the seed, too, the seed is designed to withstand the stomach acids and simply pass right through the digestive tract. When they come out, they get free fertilizer.
Perhaps your peppers work in a similar way. When they're fully grown, either the seeds inside have free sugar or free fertilizer. In the younger stages, though, the seed isn't developed enough to withstand stomach acids, and even if it does, it's not mature enough to stand a reasonable chance at growing. So to combat this, your Kepler Peppers have evolved a defense mechanism: make the young plants extra spicy, so that animals will think twice about eating them.
Or perhaps it's the other way around - the Keplerians enjoy spicy foods and despise sweet ones. As a result, the peppers have sweet young stages, to help the seeds mature even once the fruit is detached, while they have spicy mature stages, in which they attract Keplerians to provide fertilizer, as above.
In the former scenario, @TimBII beat me to it with the science, so I'll direct you to his answer for more in that department. The purpose of this post is to attempt to describe an evolutionary advantage to having such a plant: in the former, it's for defense; in the latter, it's to foster a symbiotic relationship with the Keplerians.
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