Will North American wildlife come and eat a bunch of bananas left in the forest? They aren't familiar with the fruit, but you'd think they might give it a try. Ace Vlogs set out a bunch of bananas in various stages of ripeness and rigged a trail came to see what would happen. The scent of bananas was so exotic to them that they pretty much ignored the bananas until apples were added to the mix. Now that's a familiar scent! Eventually, we see squirrels, birds, raccoons, deer, and groundhogs. (via Boing Boing)
I've been aware of this for some time from my years of cycling. It used to be customary (before the era of sports nutrition, supplements, energy gels, and what-have-you) for cyclists to gravitate to fruit such as bananas, and if I ever ate one and tossed the peel off the road into a cornfield or something, I must have done it a thousand times, figuring that it was organic and it would quickly decompose or get gobbled up by whatever critters happened to be out foraging.
ReplyDeleteCame to find out, though, that while they did eventually decompose, it wasn't as fast as I thought, and even back then the scavengers left the banana peels alone.
-"BB"-