Experimental Endozoochory of <b><i>Cannabis sativa</i></b> Achenes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The mechanism by which <i>Cannabis sativa</i> dispersed from its center of origin remains an open question. The literature provides many hypotheses, which we review for the first time, but experiments are few. Darwin was interested in zoochory – the transport of plants by animals. He demonstrated endozoochory (transport of seeds via animal digestive systems) of <i>C. sativa</i> achenes (seeds) by carrier pigeons, but he did not quantify achene survival rates. We assessed mammalian endozoochory in a triplicate experiment: feeding <i>C. sativa</i> achenes into a simulated gastrointestinal system, a dog, and a human. The in vitro system subjected achenes to sequential digestive enzymes. Achenes were planted in potting soil and monitored for emergence under growroom conditions. The in vivo experiments added achenes to a normal morning meal (dog food or granola). Feces were collected for daily instillation into an outdoor garden and monitored for seedling emergence for 16 days. Control achenes were planted directly into soil without ingestion. In the in vitro study, 34.7% of the digested achenes emerged as seedlings. The in vivo emergence rates were 10.3, 1.3, and 76.0% for the dog, human, and control conditions. The three groups differed significantly (χ<sup>2</sup> = 1,264.93, <i>p</i> &#x3c; 0.0001). Achene survival was greatest under in vitro conditions, which lacked a mastication step, compared to dog (minimal chewing) and human (maximal chewing) conditions. Although <i>C. sativa</i> lacks evolutionary traits for classic endozoochory (i.e., a fleshy fruit), it seems well adapted to this manner of seed dispersal.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".