Matagouri and Moas
Sal and I have recently returned from our ten-day tour of the South Island and while we were travelling around I got to thinking about the Matagouri that’s so prevalent there.
Matagouri is a shrub that’s endemic to New Zealand and it’s fairly common on the river plains of the South Island. It’s got big thorns protecting small leaves and they are generally not taller than head-high. Before humans arrived in New Zealand there were no land mammals other than a native bat.
What piqued my interest so much about the Matagouri is that, evolutionarily speaking, it’s wasting its time growing these big spikes and if evolutionary theory is correct there should be some purpose for this. The spikes are about 5cm long which makes them fairly ineffective against normal-sized birds but would be perfect for warding off cattle and sheep-sized herbivorous animals. The thing is, we know that there were none of these types of animals in New Zealand for long enough for the Matagouri to have evolved a defence against grazing.
Or do we?
There is a large, flightless, plant-eating bird native to New Zealand that’s now extinct called the Moa. They are thought to have gone extinct around 500 years ago but we have plenty of skeletal remains. Perhaps the Moa and the Matagouri evolved together and this relationship accounts for the defensive spines on the Matagouri?
This hypothesis fits well with the fact that most Moa remains are found in the same regions that Matagouri flourish and there don’t seem to be any other likely candidates that would account for the Matagouri’s wasteful spines.
I wonder whether we’d be able to find a living species with no obvious reason for particular features and predict a co-evolved but now extinct species? If we’d never been aware of the Moa would someone have looked at the Matagouri and predicted that there must have also been a large, leaf-eating animal that grazed on it for a sufficient period of time?
If anyone reading this knows more about Matagouri, Moas and other potential reason for the Matagouri’s large spines I’d be interested to hear from you. Also, if anyone can think of any other living species that appears to have unexplainable wasteful features please let me know.
I recently found an allusion to this phenomenon apparently called “verication” in a book edited by Brian Sykes at Oxford UP called :The Human Inheritance (1999), in a chapter talking about ancient DNA and the moas.
I do not have more information and in that book, the name of the plant was not cited so your comment helped…
Thanks for that Pierre. I’d never heard of ‘verication’ before. I’ve never read any of Sykes’ work before but have seen his Adam’s Curse book in various places. I’ll be sure to keep my eye open for the book you mentioned and look up the reference to Moas. Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to let me know about it.