The alternate bearing of pecan shows a symptom of irregular fruiting habit with one heavy crop followed by one or more years of poor production. The alternate bearing (one 'on' year, one off' year) trait in pecan is also sometimes referred to as "masting" (one on' year followed by two or more 'off' years), which is a term more often used by ecologists to describe the irregular and highly variable production pattern of forest seed trees. Dr. Eliezer Goldschmidt (2018) hypothesized that "masting and alternate bearing represent gradual steps within an evolutionary continuum, all the way through, from the wild forest tree, via the intermediary alternate and biennial bearing behavior down to the fully domesticated annually bearing fruit trees."
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