The wild squirting cucumber doesn’t wait to be eaten, blown, or carried. When it’s ready, it fires. Ecballium elaterium is a Mediterranean member of the gourd family — cousin to melon, pumpkin and courgette — but it disperses seeds like a pressure vessel with a fault. Its name comes from the Greek ekballein, “to throw out”, and it earns every syllable. Pliny the Elder warned nearly 2,000 years ago that the ripe fruit could spurt hard enough to endanger the eyes. The mechanism: - As the fruit ripens, osmotic (turgor) pressure builds inside a sealed, ovoid pod packed with mucilage and seeds, with early estimates of the driving pressure sitting in the tens of kilopascals - The stalk meets the fruit at a weak abscission joint, effectively a pre-scored cap - At maturity the pod detaches, and that stored pressure drives a jet of fluid and seeds out through the opening left behind - By Newton’s third law, the fruit recoils backwards as the jet leaves — a botanical rocket The numbers are a...