On 11 Jan 2013, at 22:01, Paige Woodward wrote: > QUESTION: What happens to seeds that are not ordered? Are they fed to local > birds and rodents? Eaten for breakast? Composted? Distributed to plant > groups or privately to allies? > IDEA: If we could store contributed seeds well, we could devote > them to science... Your heart's in the right place, Paige, but the difficulty is that science needs more than just experimental subjects. First and foremost, it needs filthy lucre to pay for all the incidental costs (supplies, equipment, buildings, utilities, etc) and salaries of the workers. Second, the very seeds that are in over supply for the seedex are probably easily obtainable by those few scientists working on seedy phenomena. The bottleneck is NOT the seeds themselves. More productive toward the end you envision would be a directory of labs where this kind of work is being carried out (if any!) and fund raising to support the work. Significant fund raising at that; a dollar doesn't buy much these days. -- Rodger Whitlock Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Z. 7-8, cool Mediterranean climate