Awesome Creepy Plant Fact - Eyes of the Amazon

I have a few Awesome Creepy Plant Facts to share with you. Here's the first one. Did you know the seeds of the guaraná plant look like a bunch of eyeballs staring out at the world? Sometimes this plant is called "eyes of the Amazon."

Of course this resemblance is purely coincidental.

Native to the Amazon basin in Brazil, guaraná seeds contain a lot of caffeine—four times that of coffee beans. It also contains other psychoactive stimulants (including saponins and tannins) associated with improved cognitive performance. And, as if that weren't impressive enough, it has been researched extensively because of its ability to prevent cardiovascular disease, as an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antidepressant, intestinal regulator, and even an aphrodisiac. Definitely a super food!

Not surprisingly, the plant has long been important to the indigenous people of the area where it grows. The Sateré-Mawé people have been cultivating guaraná in their ancestral forests for thousands of years. They have an oral legend that describes how their people are descended from a murdered child, whose eye was buried and grew into the first guaraná, then the first Sateré-Mawé person emerged from that plant.

Photo Credits:
- Guaraná seeds - AnitaFortis, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons