Sugo

Sugo is a hot-weather crop domesticated originally in Ganuo, which spread slowly through the tropics east and west. It is closely related to Pavala's diverse and abundant seagrasses, and grows small salt-rejecting organs derived from leaves that lie along the stem and near the base of the plant. The fruit it grows can be of nearly any color except green or black. Modern standardized industrial sugo is orangeish yellow. The number of calories per acre per year that can be grown with sugo is very high, around 13,500,000 calories per acre per year in ideal conditions. The plants grow specialized stems which contain few leaves and are topped by many many sugo fruits in clusters one or two feet high.

ganuo's most important crop

maybe there's a zillion people because the seas are really productive or something. that's why the salt-tolerating rice beans it looks like rice but its nutritional profile is more like beans i guess

sugo -> ganuoese bean-rice kinda like corn, doesn't care about salt, can grow it in marshy salty watery places if careful. nutritional profile more like beans. maybe a shitton of people in ganuo because can grow it in the shallow ganuoese seas?

- rice that can grow in seas like 10m deep, so ganuoese are pretty hardcore swimmers.

- female unfertilized seeds are the rice beans they harvest, male unfertilized seeds are even smaller and are bitter and potentially toxic maybe. fertilized seeds grow quite large and as soon as they decide to germinate they send a shoot upwards to the surface as fast as they can and don't stop until the shoot is above the surface

- dolphin riding to help do all the field workk

- they can grow on land too but they have a harder time on land unless they have sugo paddies (they can tolerate fresh and salt water)

- if you plant it on land the giant seed will decide instead of growing a shoot really quickly to grow a lot of roots before sprouting

- hmm i will say that the reason that sugo is adapted well for both water and land is because of ice age cycles

for sugo seed sizes:

by giant seed i mean it's like a 3 inch across fruit or something versus female sugo which would be like 2x2x10 mm and male sugo which would be like 1x1x1 mm hmm maybe

that's wild sugo

so sugo forms an aggregate fruit that goes through two stages

the first stage each "flower" (packed close together on a single stack) blooms and begins growing a tiny "fruit" (the grain) and then once the 'fruits' reach a size that they start rubbing on each other, in the wild form the growth accelerates dramatically and then a few weeks later a big fruit with lots of air stuck inside of it pops off the stem and floats around slowly getting waterlogged until it sinks

in the domesticated form the individual fruits don't go through this second stage

and they've bred sugo so that female sugo is now like 5x5x40 mm

and male sugo is the same size or maybe it's become like 2x2x2 mm because of shared genetics

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