the-blue-phantom:

proximally:

proximally:

the real worst thing about figs is that i Know and yet i still eat fig rolls bc theyre delicious

im glad u asked but also not bc now i have to relive the Knowledge

first off: if u like figs and want to continue eating figs without thinking back to this post: stop here. i didnt get this choice. my lecturer just said ‘hey dyou wanna know the awful truth of figs’ and flipped to the next slide before anyone could voice their concerns. take your time. decide if you really want this.

SO MOVING ON: figs aren’t like most fruit, in that figs are actually more or less inverse flowers – like, the flower parts (ie. sexual reproduction parts) are on the inside of the fig.

which, as you can imagine, makes them pretty hard to pollinate.

enter: the fig wasp. every species of fig has its own fig wasp, but afaik the steps are the same: a pregnant female wasp enters the unripe fig through a specific hole in the base (the ostiole), often losing her wings and antennae in the process. she then lays her eggs in the flowers inside the fig, and while she’s doing so happens to pollinate many with the pollen she’s carrying from the fig she was born in. she then dies in the fig.

meanwhile: the flowers with wasps in become these gall structures and the pollinated ones produce seeds.

male wasps are wingless: as the fig ripens, they emerge and wander around the fig looking for females to fertilise, which they do while the females have yet to even emerge themselves. they then dig tunnels to the outside of the fig for the females to escape through, and then they die, never really having left the fig.

the mated female wasps then leave through the tunnels, picking up pollen from the fig’s newly-matured male flowers, and head off to find another fig and the cycle starts anew.

NOW this may seem horrifying, and it is, but humans quite like figs and we also like selective breeding so of the 850-odd fig species in the world, we mostly just eat the common fig (Ficus carica) – one type of which has all-female flowers and doesn’t need pollinating to produce fruit, and another which has both the hermaphrodite figs and all-female figs and we only eat the all-female figs.

(ALTHOUGH the female wasps can’t like. tell one from the other. so they’ll still crawl into these useless all-female-flowers figs and then unless they were lucky and kept their wings they’ll just. die there. and be broken down by fig enzymes. and then be eaten by a human. so when you eat figs you’re quite possibly still eating wasps, but not as many wasps as you could’ve been!! so hooray!! fewer wasps!!)

and now you know the Terrible Truth of Fig, the end.

hey mother nature what the fuck