If we love figs, we must learn to love the fig wasp.
, which is what gives some figs their iconic crunch. Technically, they’re known as aggregate fruits, says Louise Ferguson, an extension specialist at the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences. In other words, the interior of each fig develops from hundreds of individual fruiting flowers.
. Mission, those purplish-black ones I bought, Sierra, Celeste, Adriatic, Kadota, and the Brown Turkey fig can all self-pollinate, says Ferguson. But the Calimyrna, which has a yellow-green skin and is typically sold dried, requires fig wasps for pollination. “There’s no real way to tell from the outside, but if the fig contains seeds it will have been pollinated [by a fig wasp],” says Shanahan.
To pollinate these species, a female fig wasp, just a couple of millimeters long, forces her way into a non-edible, unripe male-behaving fig where she lays her eggs in the flowers. Along the way, her antennae snap and her wings are yanked from her body—“it’s a tight squeeze,” says Shanahan—leaving her no way out. Her wingless male offspring mate with the winged female offspring before using their huge jaws to chomp tunnels through the fig that will allow the ladies to leave.
But before she bids adieu, that fertilized female wasp collects pollen from the male flowers. Then she squeezes out the engineered escape routes, leaving her brothers and mother for dead inside the fig. It’s her duty. Out in the world, she takes flight in search of specific figs, guided by smell, in which to layeggs. If the female wasp enters a male-behvaing fig, the process repeats identically; she sacrifices her life to further the cause.
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