Hello and welcome to your final Daily Fun Fact From Flora ,

Get ready for some figgy fun.

Now I don’t know if you remember when people started talking about whether figs are suitable for vegetarians/vegans or not.

It caused a bit of a fuss. I"m going to tell you what’s actually behind these rambunctious headlines.

So figs are all the plants in the genus Ficus and there are between 800 and 1,000 species of them. That’s a lot of figs.

Now all species of Ficus have a unique reproductive structure called the syconium. This is a (and I quote from my lecturer) large, fleshy receptacle (I don’t think I"ve every encountered a more horrifying combination of words) that contains between 50 and 7,000 (depending on species) very reduced flowers.

These plants are monoecious — which means that they have

some

But there are two types of female flower. One has a very long style (these are the true female flowers) and one has a very short style (these are actually neuter flowers).

The style is not the fig’s amazing fashion sense but is actually the “stalk” that connects the stigma (the bit that receives pollen at the top) to the ovary (where the eggs are found at the bottom).

This is how it would look on a normal flower(sadly not a fig flower — couldn’t find a diagram of them).

Each species of figshares a symbiotic relationship with their own species of fig wasp that allows for their pollination. This is a pretty weird process and it goes a little bit like this.

There is an “entrance” to the syconium called the ostiole. Now it’s a pretty tight squeeze so the female wasp really has to force her way in and will often lose her wings , antennae and even legs in the process.

See she’s really forcing her way in I think that ant might just be there for moral support ?

And then it gets really weird.

She PURPOSEFULLY pollinates female and neuter flowers.

This is odd. Most insect pollinators tend to pollinate by accident. Think of bees bumbling around looking for nectar, getting covered in pollen in the process and just kind of mixing it around. That is not what happens here.

The female has specialised pouches on the side of her thorax filled with pollen. When she’s inside she deliberately takes this pollen out of the special pouches and applies it to the stigmas of the flowers.

She then deposits eggs into the flowers. The style is too long in the female flowers for the egg to fit so she can only deposit the eggs into the neuter flowers.

Having laid her eggs, she dies.

The eggs then hatch out into male and female wasps. But what’s weird is that the males never leave the fig . ** They don’t have wings.

They will never see the outside world.

They mate with as many females as they can , then the females scoop up a bunch of pollen (to put in those handy pouches) then the males dig the females a hole to leave the syconium out of (so they don’t have squeeze out and lose their legs and antennae n shit) and the female wasps then fly away to find a new syconium.

HOW WEIRD IS THAT.

The males are totally stuck.

But this system is open to exploitation.

There are parasitic wasps that like to fuck shit up.

These have incredibly long — essentially egg-laying syringes called ovipositors that they can use to inject their eggs into the syconium. This means they don’t have to force their way in like the poor lady fig wasp who lost her legs and antennae.

When I say syringe I"m not kidding — I mean look at these guys.

Then the parasitic wasps can then hatch and eat the other grubs inside.

But don’t worry! Figs contain an enzyme called ficin that breaks down those exoskeletons so you really don’t need to worry. Also — the fig wasps are 1.5mm long so I think that even if there was one in there that hadn’t been digested — I"m not sure you"d notice.

SO ENJOY YOUR FIGS.

But no — they are technically not vegetarian. BUT a lot of commercially grown figs are self-pollinating so there are no wasps at all.

Go FIGure.

Heheh.

Love Flora xxx