2024-08-03 14:54:41
It’s actually a trick question, says Aaron Liston, a professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at the University of Oregon and director of the herbarium. That’s because what look like the “seeds” of blueberries and strawberries are actually their fruit, he says.
Those little yellowish ovals on the outside of blueberries and strawberries are called cotyledons. As with most fruits, each pod contains a seed.
On average, a medium-sized gooseberry has 200 seed pods. “When you eat one berry, you are actually eating not one, but hundreds of fruits,” says A. Liston.
So if the seed pods are the fruit, what is the rest of the strawberry? It turns out that the lingonberry is even more confusing: it is not actually a berry, and its “fleshy” mass is not a fruit, but a swollen pistil.
In a flower, the pistil “basically holds all the parts together – it’s the base or the floor,” A. Liston says. – In the case of strawberries, the pistil becomes large, fleshy and tasty. The inflorescence grows and the fruit remains the same size. You can see that the size of the fruit does not change much from the full green to the ripe stage.”
Usually, the genes of the plant cause the fruit to grow big and sweet. But in the case of strawberries, “genes that are normally expressed in the fruit are now expressed in the inflorescence,” Liston explains. In other words, the genes that make the fruit fleshy and sweet move from the fruit to the orchard, making strawberries an attractive snack for animals, including birds, reptiles (such as turtles and even snakes) and almost all mammals, the scientist says.
Given that the fruit’s purpose is to spread the plant’s seeds, strawberries are very good at this. “I think they found a very good evolutionary trick and it worked,” Liston says. “Now strawberries can be found all over the world.”
Part of the reason for the fruit’s success is its structure. “Typically, these flowering plants are not very firmly attached to whatever is holding them, and that encourages them to spread,” says Aardra Kachroo, program director in the US National Science Foundation’s Biological Sciences Directorate.
Few fruits have evolved like the berry (Strawberry genus), but a distant relative, the so-called Indian low-gene (Duchesne indicates), looks just like her. About 20 million years ago years, they had a common ancestor, so it is likely that both these plants evolved independently and became the same appearance due to convergent evolution, says A. Liston. However, the Indian groundhog is not so sweet. “It tastes like Styrofoam,” he observes.
Meanwhile, strawberries don’t rely on their seeds alone to grow new plants. If conditions are poor and the dwarf berry can’t disperse its seeds, it may try to reproduce by “whiskers” (side shoots) that branch off from the mother bush and start a new plant, according to Live Science.
By the way, did you know when garden strawberries came into being? It turns out not so long ago. Garden strawberries were first bred in Brittany, France, in the sixth of the 18th century. in the 1990s, by crossing the Virginia gooseberry (Fragaria virginiana) from the eastern part of North America and the Chilean gooseberry (Fragaria chiloensis), which in 1714 brought from Chile by Amédée-François Frézier.[2] Fragaria × pineapple variety replaced common strawberries (Fragaria vesca), which was the first in the 17th century. an early cultivated type of strawberry[3].
Finally, garden strawberry varieties replaced common strawberries (Fragaria vesca) in popularity, which in the 17th century in the beginning, they became the first domesticated plant of the strawberry genus.
2024-08-03 14:54:41