Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff Works. Hey, I'm
Speaker 1: Christian Seger, and this is brain stuff. Imagine for a
Speaker 1: minute that you're a pregnant woman. Still with me, Guys, now,
Speaker 1: the only way you can give birth is if you
Speaker 1: crawl into a small, cramped cave made out of chocolate,
Speaker 1: and the tunnel to this cave is so cramped that
Speaker 1: the only way you can get through is by cutting
Speaker 1: your own arms off a seven hours style. Once you're
Speaker 1: in this cave, you give birth, then you eventually die
Speaker 1: from either exhaustion or starvation. But guess what, you gave
Speaker 1: birth to fraternal twins. Unfortunately, your son was born blind
Speaker 1: and all he can do is dig more tunnels by
Speaker 1: chewing through the chocolate. Your daughter needs these tunnels to
Speaker 1: get out so she can begin this horrible reproductive cycle
Speaker 1: all over again. Sounds pretty grim, right, as if giving
Speaker 1: birth work difficult enough. What I just described to you
Speaker 1: is the life cycle of the fig wasp. Their role
Speaker 1: in the pollination of figs is crucial both to the
Speaker 1: propagation of their species and the survival of fig plants.
Speaker 1: This arrangement between wasp and plant is called mutualism, and
Speaker 1: it's evolved over millions of years. Without the wasp, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't have figs and vice versa. And if you're following
Speaker 1: my logic here, yes, that means that most of the
Speaker 1: figs we eat have at least one dead female wasp
Speaker 1: inside of them. Because we're usually eating processed figs, we
Speaker 1: often don't realize that a fig is technically just a
Speaker 1: flower with its petals folded inside. In the late nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: American farmers started importing fig trees to California, but they
Speaker 1: couldn't figure out why their trees were fruitless. Finally, after
Speaker 1: traveling to Turkey, they observed how fig wasps emerged from
Speaker 1: the edible figs and flew to the inedible ones. One
Speaker 1: grower went back to California with this knowledge and performed
Speaker 1: the first artificial pollination on his trees by manually transferring
Speaker 1: pollen with a toothpick. When he cut open the fruit,
Speaker 1: tea thought he saw seeds in the figs, but what
Speaker 1: he was looking at was actually wasp larvae. It wasn't
Speaker 1: until eight that the U. S Department of Agriculture experimented
Speaker 1: with live fig wasps. After several seasons, the wasps and
Speaker 1: the fig trees finally produced a successful crop. Today, farmers
Speaker 1: separate their male and female trees over a distance and
Speaker 1: use controlled wasps delivered in paper sacks to guarantee that
Speaker 1: their figs will ripen. Turkeys still the largest producer of
Speaker 1: figs in the world, but in just a century, California
Speaker 1: became the second largest, registering fifteen thousand metric tons of
Speaker 1: the fruit per year. So, okay, let's get away from
Speaker 1: the whole pregnant lady chocolate metaphor thing and break down
Speaker 1: how this fig wasp mutualism process works. For a fig
Speaker 1: plant to share its pollen with another, a female fig
Speaker 1: wasp needs to enter an unripe fig. She crawls through
Speaker 1: a narrow passage in the fig called an osteo. It's
Speaker 1: so cramped that her wings and antenna break off along
Speaker 1: the way, But it doesn't matter, because, as Juicy j
Speaker 1: once said to Katy Perry, there's no going back. But
Speaker 1: what these lady fig wasps don't know is whether they're
Speaker 1: entering a male capra fig or an already edible female fig.
Speaker 1: If it's a capra fig, she'll find its male flower
Speaker 1: parts are perfectly shaped for her to lay eggs into
Speaker 1: the eggs hatch into larvae and grow within the figs petals.
Speaker 1: The male wasps hatch first and are born blind and flightless.
Speaker 1: They mate with their female counterparts yes, I guess that
Speaker 1: technically means their brothers and sisters, and then they start
Speaker 1: eating an exit tunnel through the fig. The wasp dudes
Speaker 1: can't escape, though, so they die inside, but the females
Speaker 1: collect the figs pollen, crawl out of the tunnel, and
Speaker 1: fly away in search of a new fig plant to
Speaker 1: lay their eggs in. These wasps are only a few
Speaker 1: millimeters long, and they can fly up to twenty kilometers
Speaker 1: or twelve point four miles to find the right species
Speaker 1: of fig plant. When they arrive, they deposit their natal
Speaker 1: figs pollen, lay their eggs, and the whole process starts
Speaker 1: all over again. There are, however, two exceptions. About point
Speaker 1: three to five percent of the time, fig wasps don't
Speaker 1: collect the pollen they're supposed to, and the figs aren't pollinated.
Speaker 1: When this happens, the fig doesn't grow seeds and the
Speaker 1: tree may drop it. Any wasp offspring will die from
Speaker 1: the collision. Also, if a female wasp enters an already
Speaker 1: edible fig, she can't lay her eggs. Because of a
Speaker 1: long part of the flower called the stylus, she'll probably die,
Speaker 1: but at least she's delivered the pollen. An enzyme inside
Speaker 1: the fig called feistin breaks down her corpse into protein,
Speaker 1: ingesting the dead wasp and making it part of the
Speaker 1: ripe and fruit. So just so we're clear here, those
Speaker 1: crunchy bits that you're chewing on in figs, those aren't
Speaker 1: bits of dead wasp. There the fig seeds, and anyway,
Speaker 1: you should get used to the idea of occasionally eating
Speaker 1: an insect by accident. There in lots of agricultural products peanut, butter,
Speaker 1: canned corn, and even coffee can have insect bits in them.
Speaker 1: Check out the brain stuff channel on YouTube, and for
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com.