This is how the insect is trapped in each of these fruits
The figs They are one of the most appetizing and popular fruits of the summer season, but what many people ignore is that figs contain a surprising secret inside: each of these fruits contains within the corpse of a wasp.
There is no reason to be alarmed, because the aforementioned insect (which we inadvertently ingest with each fig we eat) is already totally disintegrated and even forms part of the fruit. It is, specifically, the so-called fig wasp. But how did it get there?
These insects are mainly responsible for pollinating the fig trees so that, year after year, the trees can continue to flourish and bear their delicious fruit. That is why without these wasps the existence of fig trees would not be possible.
Aristotle already described, in his animal history, that the fruits of wild figs contained wasps, which formed as larvae, broke the “skin” of the pupa, and flew like midges. He believed that they were produced by spontaneous generation.
This is how they get inside
It’s not exactly like that. Unlike other trees, which have an open flower that is easily accessible to insects, the flowers of the fig trees are located inside the fruits that we see, closed and difficult to pollinate.
Of course, this greatly complicates the access of insects that go from flower to flower. But the same is not true of fig wasps, which are the only insects capable of entering inside the flower and transferring pollen from a male tree to a female one.
In this way, they lay their eggs in the male flowers (which are the edge fruits that are not usually eaten) and when the larvae grow and come out of that edge covered with pollen, ready to pollinate, they go to the female figs.
In this way, the wasps manage to carry the pollen from one flower to another, but this is so, at a very high price, since the operation ends up costing them their lives. When the wasps enter the female fig, they do so through a very narrow duct and can never get out of it again.
Consequently, the insect ends up dying inside and its remains will become fertilizer that will help the fruit to develop. In this way, when we eat a fig we also eat the remains of a wasp, but we will never perceive even the slightest remnant of itsince it has already been fully integrated into the fruit.
Fig wasps are actually a group of species often unrelated to each other, but with morphological similarities that result from their life cycle within figs. Scientists are, in fact, still clarifying their taxonomy and there are several families of wasps grouped under this definition.
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