7 Extinct Fruits

Thought some may enjoy this… 7 Extinct Fruits  - AZ Animals

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Monocrop wheat fields are grown instead of fruit varieties because it’s more profitable for farmers, leading fruits like the Ansault pear to become extinct.

The first phrase might be true but the conclusion is not.

The article contains other flights of fancy and misuse of the word extinct, so generally it’s not worth reading.

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This article title is kind of a misleading title and so is the name of this thread. The correct wording in 7 extinct cultivars. The reality is there are likely thousands or millions of fruit cultivar that went extinct because they are not worth growing. Fruits we cultivate today are cultivated for taste, disease resistance and ease to grow. If you cultivate 1 tree that is taking up space you could grow something else in. There are something like 7500 different kinds of apples and America is home to at least 2500 of them. How many of those 2500 apple varieties have you heard let alone 7500 of them. The mango on the list was stated to be very fibrous which is not desirable, the pear was not consistent for example. Everything on the list put it under something we would grow today.

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Thanks for posting, I had not heard of the Judean Date Palm and thought it was pretty cool that 2,000 year old seeds germinated. I found a write up in the Atlantic from a couple years ago that had more information on the project.

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I love how they claim that the Madagascar banana is going extinct because of climate change. It’s funny that this wild banana has existed for thousands of years through much more severe climate cycles, but a one degree increase in global temperature is causing it to go extinct.

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There probably haven’t been humans removing all of it’s habitat until the industrial revolution… It seems to me that human overpopulation is a probable cause of many current and future extinction events.

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Some of us realize the climate has fluctuated a lot more than a degree or even three at some points in the past. I figured all the ‘red lines’ had some sinister motivation behind them (and over time my suspicions have been confirmed). Control and resource redistribution are among the obvious motives of constant chatter about carbon and supposed consequences and a need to ‘sequester’ it.

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Agreed.

If they think the number of distinct fruit varieties is doing poor compared to 100 years ago, they should crunch the numbers on people.

More than 99% of people have gone extinct :wink:

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climate effects right now are about speed of change. plants can’t migrate as quickly as the climate is changing. unlike previous shifts

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I’d not be too hasty in making that supposition. Aren’t many things that might fail to acclimate – things people are trying to raise far from their native locations? Pawpaw is the largest fruit Native to the US and Canada. It’s having no troubles from Florida to Ontario that I can tell.

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