B<\/span>en Crair wants us to appreciate the fig<\/a> as more than \u201ca geriatric delicacy or the sticky stuff inside bad cookies.\u201d Figs are \u201cawesome: enclosed flowers that bloom modestly inward, unlike the flamboyant showoffs on other plants. Bite a fig in half and you\u2019ll discover a core of tiny blossoms.\u201d<\/p>\nFlowers, and wasp carcasses: \u201cBecause a fig is actually a ball of flowers, it requires pollination, but because the flowers are sealed, not just any bug can crawl inside. That task belongs to a minuscule insect known as the fig wasp, whose life cycle is intertwined with the fig\u2019s. Mother wasps lay their eggs in an unripe fig. After their offspring hatch and mature, the males mate and then chew a tunnel to the surface, dying when their task is complete. The females follow and take flight, riding the winds until they smell another fig tree. . . . For the wasp mother, however, devotion to the fig plant soon turns tragic. A fig\u2019s entranceway is booby-trapped to destroy her wings, so that she can never visit another plant. When you eat a dried fig, you\u2019re probably chewing fig-wasp mummies, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Figs are astonishingly versatile and variable. They can be \u201cshrubs, vines, or trees\u201d and \u201cstrangler figs\u201d sprout in other trees, take root, and then take over the host: \u201cThe branches of a large strangler fig can stretch over acres and produce a million figs in one flowering. Figs themselves can be brown, red, white, orange, yellow, or green.\u201d Figs can grow on \u201crooftops, cliff sides, volcanic islands.\u201d Over a thousand different birds and animals eat figs, and fig trees bear fruit year round.<\/p>\n
So: Consider the fig.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ben Crair wants us to appreciate the fig as more than \u201ca geriatric delicacy or the sticky stuff inside bad cookies.\u201d Figs are \u201cawesome: enclosed flowers that bloom modestly inward, unlike the flamboyant showoffs on other plants. Bite a fig in half and you\u2019ll discover a core of tiny blossoms.\u201d Flowers, and wasp carcasses: \u201cBecause […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1607,1638],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-botany","category-figs"],"yoast_head":"\n
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