Ash Gourd on the Yam Plant!!?

If you roam around in the compound, sometimes you come across some funny sights; all works of nature!

There is an 'Ash gourd' plant growing in the wild right in front of our house. Probably it grew up from the seeds of a spoilt Ash gourd that was thrown away or from bird droppings. A few days back I was looking around to see if it is bearing any gourds since there were quite a few flowers. I came across a couple of them, one hanging from the stem of a 'Yam' (Elephant Yam) plant growing nearby.

About four days later when I went to check up on it, I could not locate the gourd readily, nor the Yam plant from which it was hanging. After a bit of searching around I located the gourd resting on the ground. As the gourd grew larger, the stem of the Yam plant found it too heavy to support and bent down leaving the Ashgourd to rest on the ground.

One funny thing that I have noticed over the years is that many times the plants that grow up on their own in the wild survive much better and bear more fruits than the ones that we plant and tend to, with care! May be, growing up on their own in the wild, the plants develop immunity to some of the common pests which they don't when we tend to them and afford protection. Or it may be that the some of wild plants and grass that grow around them afford better protection to them from the pests than the best insecticides (organic or otherwise) that we use to protect them.