Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff Works. Hey, I'm Christian Seger, and this is brain stuff. Imagine for a minute that you're a pregnant woman. Still with me, Guys, now, the only way you can give birth is if you crawl into a small, cramped cave made out of chocolate, and the tunnel to this cave is so cramped that the only way you can get through is by cutting your own arms off a seven hours style. Once you're in this cave, you give birth, then you eventually die
from either exhaustion or starvation. But guess what, you gave birth to fraternal twins. Unfortunately, your son was born blind and all he can do is dig more tunnels by chewing through the chocolate. Your daughter needs these tunnels to get out so she can begin this horrible reproductive cycle all over again. Sounds pretty grim, right, as if giving birth work difficult enough. What I just described to you
is the life cycle of the fig wasp. Their role in the pollination of figs is crucial both to the propagation of their species and the survival of fig plants. This arrangement between wasp and plant is called mutualism, and it's evolved over millions of years. Without the wasp, you wouldn't have figs and vice versa. And if you're following my logic here, yes, that means that most of the figs we eat have at least one dead female wasp
inside of them. Because we're usually eating processed figs, we often don't realize that a fig is technically just a flower with its petals folded inside. In the late nineteenth century, American farmers started importing fig trees to California, but they couldn't figure out why their trees were fruitless. Finally, after traveling to Turkey, they observed how fig wasps emerged from
the edible figs and flew to the inedible ones. One grower went back to California with this knowledge and performed the first artificial pollination on his trees by manually transferring pollen with a toothpick. When he cut open the fruit, tea thought he saw seeds in the figs, but what he was looking at was actually wasp larvae. It wasn't until eight that the U. S Department of Agriculture experimented with live fig wasps. After several seasons, the wasps and
the fig trees finally produced a successful crop. Today, farmers separate their male and female trees over a distance and use controlled wasps delivered in paper sacks to guarantee that their figs will ripen. Turkeys still the largest producer of figs in the world, but in just a century, California became the second largest, registering fifteen thousand metric tons of the fruit per year. So, okay, let's get away from the whole pregnant lady chocolate metaphor thing and break down
how this fig wasp mutualism process works. For a fig plant to share its pollen with another, a female fig wasp needs to enter an unripe fig. She crawls through a narrow passage in the fig called an osteo. It's so cramped that her wings and antenna break off along the way, But it doesn't matter, because, as Juicy j
once said to Katy Perry, there's no going back. But what these lady fig wasps don't know is whether they're entering a male capra fig or an already edible female fig. If it's a capra fig, she'll find its male flower parts are perfectly shaped for her to lay eggs into the eggs hatch into larvae and grow within the figs petals. The male wasps hatch first and are born blind and flightless.
They mate with their female counterparts yes, I guess that technically means their brothers and sisters, and then they start eating an exit tunnel through the fig. The wasp dudes can't escape, though, so they die inside, but the females collect the figs pollen, crawl out of the tunnel, and fly away in search of a new fig plant to lay their eggs in. These wasps are only a few millimeters long, and they can fly up to twenty kilometers or twelve point four miles to find the right species
of fig plant. When they arrive, they deposit their natal figs pollen, lay their eggs, and the whole process starts all over again. There are, however, two exceptions. About point three to five percent of the time, fig wasps don't collect the pollen they're supposed to, and the figs aren't pollinated. When this happens, the fig doesn't grow seeds and the tree may drop it. Any wasp offspring will die from the collision. Also, if a female wasp enters an already
edible fig, she can't lay her eggs. Because of a long part of the flower called the stylus, she'll probably die, but at least she's delivered the pollen. An enzyme inside the fig called feistin breaks down her corpse into protein, ingesting the dead wasp and making it part of the ripe and fruit. So just so we're clear here, those crunchy bits that you're chewing on in figs, those aren't bits of dead wasp. There the fig seeds, and anyway, you should get used to the idea of occasionally eating
an insect by accident. There in lots of agricultural products peanut, butter, canned corn, and even coffee can have insect bits in them. Check out the brain stuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.