Why Fruits Rot, Seeds Mold, and Meat Spoils

Abstract

When an animal eats "spoiled" or "rotten" food of any kind, it runs a largely unknown risk (except in the case of grains) of being injured by toxins or microbe-produced antibiotics, getting food with lowered nutrient content, and infecting itself with microbes. Of course, these consequences may all be the product of microbes interacting with each other. However, I suspect that these traits have also been molded by the generally maladaptive event of having yourself and your resources eaten by a large animal. Animals have probably also done their part in evolving fairly accurate means of knowing when a food item contains organisms that do not wish to be eaten and therefore have coevolved sensory input. I would not suggest that the selective pressure for the production of alcohols, free acids, aflatoxins, qureomycin, botulinin, enterotoxin, etc., is solely the repulsion of large animals, but I would suggest that large animals have played a large and virtually unrecognized role in evolution of their production. Fruits rot, seeds mold, and meat spoils because that is the way microbes compete with bigger organisms.