Coyote Melon, Nature’s Trick

by Pat Flanagan

Growing along the edge of washes and over rocks and shrubs, the coyote melon (Cucurbita palmata) thrives during the desert’s summer monsoon season. The blue-green fingered leaves and grasping tendrils grab sunlight to feed the large orange-yellow trumpet shaped flowers and the striped green fruit, which ages to yellow when ripe.  Desert residents recognize coyote melon as wild and native, while visitors wonder from where it escaped.  This gourd and its Cucurbita relatives are native to the new world and come with a reputation ranging from delightful to disgusting.

Coyote melon fruit begs to be gathered.  By whom, you should ask?  Slow Food aficionados pride themselves on providing fresh harvested seasonal fruits and vegetables; however this melon will never pass your lips.  The pulp (actually the placental attachment for the seeds) contains cucurbitacins, among the bitterest substances known to mankind.  If you actually swallowed some of the pulp, the emetic action would thoroughly and for days cleanse your digestive tract.  For all this, Indians did roast and eat the highly nutritional oily seeds after carefully cleaning them of pulp.  The Indians attribute coyote, “the trickster”, with giving these melons a bitter flavor while providing edible seeds.

With help, melons and squash fruits can distribute seeds widely.  An animal attracted to a sweet squash eats the whole, digests the pulp, and defecates the seeds; usually at some distance from the mother plant.  Who are the harvesters of the bitter coyote melon?  Although coyote lips can carefully nibble around the pulp to get the seeds, they digest the next generation rather than distribute it.  For the most part, gourds today remain whole and either disintegrate slowly or float on flood waters to new locations.  Connie Barlow’s, The Ghosts of Evolution, reports that mastodons and their kin enjoyed the desert gourd.  Seeds from one gourd species were found in a Florida bog associated with a mastodon.  In African forests elephants are known to eat extremely bitter foods, and the same goes for rhinoceros in Nepal.  The desert gourd reminds us it has been a mere 12,000 or so years since large mammals roamed, eating their way across the North American landscape.

For at least 3,000 years Native peoples have cultivated squash, hybridizing many varieties.  They knew to pull a coyote melon volunteer at first leaf.  All species of the Cucurbita require native squash and gourd bees to transfer pollen from the male to female flowers.  If coyote melon pollen reaches the female flowers of edible squashes, it can transfer the bitter taste.  Coyote at play.