If evolving to bear good tasting fruit meant being able to spread seeds through animals and birds, why did some plants develop bad tasting fruit like chili and lemon?

Question

If evolving to bear good tasting fruit meant being able to spread seeds through animals and birds, why did some plants develop bad tasting fruit like chili and lemon?

In: 3

Answer 1

Chili peppers and other spicy plants aren’t spicy to birds. Birds lack the receptor that most mammals have that makes us sensitive to capsaicin, which is what makes many spicy foods “hot” to us. But not to birds – they don’t process the capsaicin. So pepper plants evolved to disperse their seeds father away than many fruit-bearing plants. Birds eat the peppers and mammals generally don’t. Birds tend to travel greater distances than mammals. So seeds dropped by birds are generally more widely dispersed than seeds dropped by mammals, allowing spicy plants to spread around more easily.

And lemons are darn good. Animals like them.