Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Real kudzu doesn't even come that far south into Florida. It may not like sandy soil or something.

Like all plants, it's actually rather fuzzy about growing conditions. There is a reason there is a lot of plant diversity in the world you know. If something could easily adapt to grow wildly everywhere, it already would have.

Kudzu gets a lot of press because it really likes the sort of open disturbed ground where humans have cut a road, plowed a field, or built a building, so it tends to grow where the people are to notice it.

Most weeds are like that really. In the wild they are specialists in fast recolonization of areas some disaster has cleared off, and will be outcompeted in a few years, so they tend to be relatively rare. The human habit of inflicting disasters on huge areas of the same ground over and over (by plowing or burning or mowing or clear cutting or whatever) is a real boon to them.

Note incidentally that in its native habitats in east Asia, kuzu is a pretty decent food crop, so you really need that poison co-mutation to turn this into a hell world.