Mast Seeding
Mast seeding or masting is a mass seeding phenomenon exhibited by some species of plants which can be defined as "synchronous production of seed at long intervals by a population of plants." Masting, in the strict sense of the term, occurs only in monocarpic (or semelparous) species, whose members reproduce only once during their lifetime, then die.
A mast year is a year in which vegetation produces a significant abundance of mast. The term originally applied solely to trees, like oak trees, that produce fruit useful for feeding farm animals. This provides food for animals like rats and stoats, whose populations can explode during a mast year, having been reduced by a lack of food in previous non-mast years. In turn, this makes it more likely that birds will be targeted by the pests, or that rats will invade nearby fields in what is called a "rat flood."
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Famous quotes containing the words mast and/or seeding:
“To coöperate in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together. I heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over the world, the one without money, earning his means as he went, before the mast and behind the plow, the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket. It was easy to see that they could not long be companions or coöperate, since one would not operate at all. They would part at the first interesting crisis in their adventures.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Propaganda has a bad name, but its root meaning is simply to disseminate through a medium, and all writing therefore is propaganda for something. It’s a seeding of the self in the consciousness of others.”
—Elizabeth Drew (1887–1965)