Several weeks ago, I posted my hypothesis that passiflora seeds were designed to germinate well only after passing through the intestinal tract of some animal such as a raccoon or a possum. The idea met resistance.

Well, more or less by accident, on the Internet I found a master's thesis written at the University of Canterbury, a New Zealand school. The investigator studied the banana passionflower, P. mollissima (sp?); it has become an invasive weed in that country. One discovery was that, after being eaten by pigs or possums, the recovered seed had a germination rate of around 50%!!!

You gotta admire the devotion of that graduate student, sifting through pig feces to recover seeds! Glad that was not my thesis... though I did work in an area that still had land mines about (the Sinai).