If you want proof that Mother Nature has a sense of humor, look no further than the squirting cucumber. Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like; yes, it’s as funny as you’re imagining; and yes, thanks to new research out of Kiel University in Germany, you can now witness it for yourself.
“We recorded the explosion of the fruit with high-speed videos at 1,000 fps and 10,000 fps to calculate the speed of the seeds and the possible shooting distances,” reported Helen Gorges, a PhD student at the Department of Functional Morphology and Biomechanics in the Zoological Institute of Kiel, in a statement last week. “We also analyzed pictures during the ripening of the fruits to measure the curvature of the fruit stem and the angle between fruit and stem.”
The result? Well, see for yourself – but we warn you: it could be NSFW, depending on how easily scandalized your boss is.
Now, amusing though this is, we promise that it’s also serious research. Seed dispersal is a super important part of plant reproduction – it’s how the plants ensure that the offspring won’t be in competition with their parents for nutrients and water, and it helps reduce risk to the species in general by spreading its habitat wider than one easily destroyed island.
As with many such essential evolutionary processes, nature has come up with a wide range of solutions for the problem of spreading those seeds as far as possible. You’ve got the shakers – plants like poppies or red campion, whose flowers grow into a little pepperpot-like structure filled with seeds; others, like dandelions or sycamores, rely on the wind to travel away from their parent plant. Some plants hitch a ride from an animal – whether by getting eaten and pooped out, or caught up on some mammal’s fur or hooves – and others just plop down on the ground and roll away (we’re looking at you, conkers).
But by far the funniest – and, more importantly, the most intriguing from a biomechanical perspective – are those plants that just kind of… explode. And, thanks to this new research project, we now know that the squirting cucumber at least is pretty perfectly set up for doing so: they stand up as they ripen, becoming what the research team seemingly refuse to describe as “erect”, creating an average 53° angle with the horizontal – strikingly close to what you’d choose if you were designing the perfect seed-shooting system using math.
They’re champion squirters, too: their seeds are projected up to 12 meters (39 feet) away from the fruit, being sploodged – a technical term, or at least it should be, since they come out with a thick, gooey covering that dries sticky on whatever it hits – at speeds of up to 47 kilometers per hour (29 miles per hour). “It’s super interesting to watch the explosions through high-speed recordings,” Gorges explained, “as the explosions happen way too fast to see anything in real-time!”
Aside from even the biological perspectives, the team insist this research has real-world applications: “There are […] many applications in soft robotics, drug delivery systems and similar devices,” Gorges said, “where energy-efficient launching systems are desired.”
So there. It’s real science. Stop giggling.
The research was presented at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Antwerp, Belgium, on July 8, 2025.
Source Link: Squirting Cucumbers, World’s Least SFW Fruit, Caught Exploding On Camera
