The Universe of Discourse

Were giant ground sloths immune to poison ivy?

The skin of the mango fruit contains urushiol, the same irritating chemical that is found in poison ivy. But why? From the mango's point of view, the whole point of the mango fruit is to get someone to come along and eat it, so that they will leave the seed somewhere else. Posioning the skin seems counterproductive.

An analogous case is the chili pepper, which contains an irritating chemical, capsaicin. I think the answer here is believed to be that while capsaicin irritates mammals, birds are unaffected. The chili's intended target is birds; you can tell from the small seeds, which are the right size to be pooped out by birds. So chilis have a chemical that encourages mammals to leave the fruit in place for birds.

What's the intended target for the mango fruit? Who's going to poop out a seed the size of a mango pit? You'd need a very large animal, large enough to swallow a whole mango. There aren't many of these now, but that's because they became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene epoch: woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses, huge crocodiles, giant ground sloths, and so on. We may have eaten the animals themselves, but we seem to have quite a lot of fruits around that evolved to have their seeds dispersed by Pleistocene megafauna that are now extinct. So my first thought was, maybe the mango is expecting to be gobbled up by a giant gound sloth, and have its giant seed pooped out elsewhere. And perhaps its urushiol-laden skin makes it unpalatable to smaller animals that might not disperse the seeds as widely, but the giant ground sloth is immune. (Similarly, I'm told that goats are immune to urushiol, and devour poison ivy as they do everything else.)

Well, maybe this theory is partly correct, but even if so, the animal definitely wasn't a giant ground sloth, because those lived only in South America, whereas the mango is native to South Asia. Ground slots and avocados, yes; mangos no.

Still the theory seems reasonable, except that mangoes are tropical fruit and I haven't been able to find any examples of Pleistocene megafauna that lived in the tropics. Still I didn't look very hard.

Wikipedia has an article on evolutionary anachronisms that lists a great many plants, but not the mango.

[ Addendum: I've eaten many mangoes but never noticed any irritation from the peel. I speculate that cultivated mangoes are varieties that have been bred to contain little or no urushiol, or that there is a post-harvest process that removes or inactivates the urushiol, or both. ]

[ Addendum 20200715: I know this article was a little disappointing and that it does not resolve the question in the title. Sorry. But I wrote a followup that you might enjoy anyway. ]

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