Have you ever been having a catch with your friends and then your ball gets tossed into one of these sharp, prickly, absolute sleeve ruining plants? 

Well in my town these seem to be in every place we had a catch like the town park, school fields, and our backyards. Whenever I see one of these I automatically cringe as the feeling of having to constantly crawl in them to get my ball never leaves my mind. It truly is poetic how the stickers latch onto your skin just like that feeling of it reaching into your forearm while scraping the skin off as it finds its way around your arm latches onto your memory. You have to give it credit though because it is a pure physical and mental attacker, like the Floyd Mayweather of shrubbery.

I looked into what exactly a sticker bush is and I realized it is not as treacherous as I thought. The stickers are actually called burs and they are the fruit of the plant. It uses those burs to stick onto fur of other organisms walking by in order to spread and create more of its kind. Furthermore, The burs are a great defense mechanism in case other organisms try to make it their midday snack. A pretty clever survival tactic, if an animal munches on it once it will remember it for the rest of its life and know to stay away.

So really these prickly plants are like everyone and everything else just trying to survive and protect itself. It turns out my massive grudge on the sticker bush from way back to when I was a little kid was pointless. I now know that plant did nothing to me. It was just trying to chill with its plant friends and I invaded its personal space. If this scenario was among humans then a fight would certainly occur. 

And just as an extra note these plants are the reason we have Velcro and where would the world be without Velcro?