If you like figs, you may have heard some unsettling lore about them. All figs hide the wasps because these insects need to craze inside for the fruit to grow. But does the figs we eat really have a house, or is this just a myth?
The answer lies somewhere in between. While hornets play an important role in the life cycle of many types of fig trees, most figs in supermarkets may be bug free.
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“Fig trees and fig hornets are great examples of reciprocity,” Charlotte Jander, a plant ecology and evolution researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden, told Live Science in an email. “Other examples of reciprocity include trees and mycorrhizal fungi that help trees ingest nutrients, animals and their gut microorganisms, as well as flower plants and pollinators.”
In the case of fig and fig wasps, the fruit is pollinated, and the wasps can be replicated, leading to reciprocity. However, this relationship is rather complicated.
What we consider to be the “fruit” of figs is actually a hollow structure called syconium, filled with small flowers. Generally, when female fig wasps cra from female fig trees into the cinconium, she needs the plants to spread pollen and produce and mature seeds. The hole the wasp crawls is very small, and she may lose her wings and antennas in the process, and even die inside a fig.
Therefore, it is possible that some types of figs have dead fig hornets inside.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the figs we eat have a wasp inside. Not all types of figs require pollination to ripen. Humans eat ficuscarica, a fig species. Ficuscalica features several cultivars that are partenocarpic. This means that ripe fruits can be produced without pollination.
“Most figs we eat in the US don’t have pants in them,” Carlos Machado, a professor of biology at the University of Maryland, told Live Science in an email.
Mission figs and brown turkey figs are two commonly sold fig cultivars that do not require wasp pollination to mature and produce seeds, Jandea said. However, this does not apply to all the figs that humans eat. Smur-nails, kalimill-nails and wild figs around the Mediterranean all rely on wasps for pollination.
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“Most wild figs require pollination to produce ripe fruit,” explained Machado. So, these types of figs may have small wasps in them, but that is not a guarantee yet.
Related: How do plants containing seeds-free fruits breed?
Just because a hornet was once on a fig doesn’t mean it’s still there before the fig can be eaten. Ficuscalcia Cinconia has an opening large enough to leave the structure after fig wasps enter. When a wasp dies inside, her body is generally crushed and decomposed from the process of fig maturation, Jandea said.
“If there were any remains of the original pollinators, you probably wouldn’t see them,” Jandair explained. The crispy texture is more likely from plant seeds, not from the remainder of the wasp.
The life cycle of fig hornets
Although bees can die in figs, these fruits are actually an important part of the breeding cycle. Just as most types of figs require wasp pollination to make new fruit, fig wasps could not be reproduced without the help of fig trees.
When a female hornet crawls into fig syconium, the type of fig we eat, she just pollinates it. However, when she challenges Cinconium from a male tree called Caprifigure and is generally not eaten by humans, she begins to lay eggs.
There, eggs develop from larvae to young wasps hatching. Generally, male hornets die within the caprifigure after mating, but they help bite the tunnels that allow female hornets to escape. Eventually, the fertilized female hornet burst in search of new figs to lay eggs, bringing in pollen from the old Caprifigure.
There are over 850 species of fig trees, each of which can only be pollinated by a specific species of fig hornet, Jandea said. The relationship between these plants and animals evolved millions of years ago, and both Machado and Jandale pointed out their importance. As a keystone species and organisms that many other plants and animals in the ecosystem rely on to survive, the relationship between fig trees and wasps is of great interest to researchers.
“There is essentially a reciprocity of other plant pollinators, but the fig fig hornet wasp cohort is probably the most diverse and most important,” Machado said.
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