In our neighborhood, at the right time of the year, the cottonwood trees toss down great quantities of their "cotton". It looks like wisps of spider web but in the fairy light maze are the seeds. There are often rolls and masses and wispy chunks of the stuff.
At other times, it is the maple "copters" that twist their way to the ground in great numbers. From a little distance, you might not notice them on the tree but get close and look up.
Natalie Angier says that having way too many and then culling, weeding, selecting is a basic move in living things, whether it is the woman's eggs, the sperm in the ejaculate, the seeds from a cottonwood or maple.
She writes:
This is a basic principle of living organisms. Life is profligate; life is a spendthrift; life can persist only by living beyond its means. You make things in extravagant abundance, and then you shave back, throw away, kill off the excess. Through extensive cell death the brain is molded, transformed from a teeming pudding of primitive, over-populous neurons into an organized structure of convolutions and connections, recognizable lobes and nuclei; by the time the human brain has finished developing, in infancy, 90 percent of its original cell number has died, leaving the privileged few to sustain the hard work of dwelling on mortality.
Angier, Natalie (1999-04-06). Woman: An Intimate Geography (p. 3). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
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