General Knowledge
Why is the inside of a fig full of tiny flowers rather than seeds?
- A fig is a flower turned outside in
- They are seeds
- They are eggs
The answer is A fig is a flower turned outside in. A fig is an inverted cluster of flowers, pollinated by a tiny wasp.
Because a fig is not a fruit in the ordinary sense - it is a flower cluster turned outside in. Hundreds of tiny flowers line the inside of a hollow pod, facing inward, with a single small opening at the end. What look like seeds when you eat one are the individual fruits of those flowers.
Which raises the obvious problem: pollen cannot get in. The answer is a wasp a couple of millimetres long that crawls through the opening, usually losing its wings and antennae on the way, pollinates the flowers, lays eggs and dies inside. Her offspring hatch, mate, and the females leave carrying pollen to the next fig. Most fig species have their own wasp species and neither survives without the other - a partnership around 80 million years old.
The dead wasp is not in your fig. An enzyme in the fig breaks it down entirely, and in any case the common edible varieties are usually parthenocarpic - they ripen without pollination and need no wasp at all. Wild and some commercial figs do use the full arrangement, and the wasp is genuinely there and genuinely digested.