Oh no???? This is so stressful. Even the very first people to domesticate animals got to watch them eating in their natural environment first.  Apparently she's fine though? How about some more language lessons, they can go over present vs past tense.

Verb tenses are fascinating, although she seems to have a little trouble with them—she can recognize the difference between past and present, and echo recently produced sentences with 'yes' and 'no' attached to demonstrate understanding of present versus past actions ("Petal ate strawberry yes! Petal eats strawberry no!"), but has some trouble producing novel utterances that use verb tense appropriately.

It's still terribly impressive, in that if she improves on her current state of cognition by as much as newborn humans eventually improve on theirs she'll end up impressive and terrifying.

Ari has not come up with any good hypotheses about the hexagonal grid of duplicated plant bits, so she just points at them and said "Petal made these?"

"Petal made these yes!" she agrees. "Yes yes make!"

And she demonstrates the harvesting process once again, this time on the sunflower head, which yields a third sunflower seed to add to the pattern.

"Petal make this!" She carries it over to the grid and places it with the others. "Petal put this here!" She triumphantly nibbles a peanut.

"Yes here, no there?" She points at a different empty spot at the edge of the pattern.

"Petal put this here yes. Petal put this there no," she agrees. Whether this is a statement about her preferences or just about the actions she took is unclear.

She picks up the seed and moves it to where she pointed, saying "Ari put this here?" Messing with someone else's project is so obnoxious of her, but she doesn't know how else to get at the question.

Petal blinks confusedly at this question. "Ari put this here yes no?" she asks.

"Yes, Ari put this here." She's going to want to get into pronouns at some point but not right now, there's already too much on the stack. Mostly "good" and "bad" and the concept of purposeful action for a reason.

"Ari put this here yes." But she's still a little confused about it.

Ari drums her fingers on her knee contemplatively, then stands up. "Ari head higher because Ari stood up. Petal put this here because . . . ?"

"Because..." she echoes, enthralled by the possibilities of this new word.

"Petal put this here because Petal make this?"

"Petal put this here yes and there no because?"

"Because..." Confused trilling.

Hmm. How about if she...

She picks up the sunflower seed and puts it back where she first put it. Then she puts it at the hexgrid location Ari suggested. Then she puts it at another hexgrid location on the edge of the pattern. "Put here yes, put here yes, put here yes."

Then she picks up the sunflower seed and puts it on top of Ari's head. "Put here no!" she says, giggling.

She picks the sunflower seed out of her hair, musing on how weird it is that Petal has such legible nonverbal communication, and puts it directly on top of another sunflower seed. "Put here yes/no?"

"Put here no!" She picks it up and moves it back to yet another valid hexgrid location.

"Because?"

"Because..."

Hmm, how to explain...

She picks up three petals, carries them a little ways away from the hexgrid, and piles them in an untidy heap. "One two three," she says.

Then she picks up three more petals, carries them a little ways away from the hexgrid, and sets them down in a neat triangle formation as though to start another hexgrid. "One two three..." She noses the third petal closer to the other two, slowly and carefully, as though concentrating very hard on the process. "...one," she announces triumphantly, as the three petals merge into a single larger prettier fancier petal.

"Oooooooh." She has no idea how that just happened, or to what purpose, but it's awesome. The long-term implications of conservation of mass having gone out the window, down the fire escape and off toward the train station are additionally awesome.

If she does superficially the same thing to another set of three petals, does this produce the same result?

It's odd; nudging one of the petals in the hexgrid toward another one produces a slight tangible resistance, which escalates as she moves it. If she completes the motion despite that, she is rewarded with... all the contiguous petals in the hexgrid contracting together, merging, and expanding again into a smaller hexgrid of the fancier petal type. There are twelve petals in the smaller hexgrid, for a total of thirteen if you include the one Petal made.

"Ari make this yes!" says Petal, bouncing slightly.

"Woah." She photographs the fancier petal and tries to identify it, while acknowledging to herself that this is unlikely to help much with her basic confusion of "what are the fundamental laws that govern the world". Did the sunflower seeds and dandelion puffs scoot across the floor to end up at the edges of the new grid, or are they off in uncolonized floor? (Also that reminds her she should tell the cleaning service not to come by tomorrow, and the incongruity makes her laugh.)

The other harvested objects remain where Petal originally put them. She helpfully consolidates the thirteenth fancy petal into the same grid as the other twelve, but doesn't move any of the other isolated objects.

Ari goes to the pantry and gets out a bag of sunflower seeds and puts one of them down next to one of the others. "Will this . . . merge?" she mimes a bunch of things scrunching together to illustrate.

She inspects the new item very closely, noses it a few times, then lines it up in a grid with two of her harvested seeds and gives it a shove. Nothing happens.

"This merge no," she concludes.

"Things Petal make merge yes, things Petal does not make merge no?"