Inside the rounded fruit of a fig tree is a maze of flowers. That is, a fig is not actually a fruit; it is an inflorescence—a cluster of many flowers and seeds contained inside a bulbous stem. Because ...

If the female wasp arrives in a male fig—also known as a caprifig—she lays her eggs and then dies. Her eggs hatch, with blind, flightless male wasps hatching first.

In these (about 400) varieties, all the figs on each tree behave as either male or female. To pollinate these species, a female fig wasp, just a couple of millimeters long, ...

It may seem obvious that figs get a green check for anyone living with a vegan diet, but that's actually not the case. Here's ...

Across the fig tree’s range there exist some 10,000 living species of fig wasps as well, says Farache — “that’s about the same number of birds that live in the world!” Of these, just ...

The male wasps dig a hole, allowing the females to escape with eggs and pollen and carry them to another fig tree. The mother wasp dies after laying eggs, which means she perishes inside the fig.

One Tiny Wasp Turns a Fig Tree Into a 150-Foot-High Eden. Birds, bats, monkeys by the dozen: A fruiting fig tree is a riot of life. It all goes back to the tree's ancient partnership with an insect.

In the summer, the fig tree produces a synconium that is ready to receive the pollen bearing wasps that emerges from winter-spring synconium. The summer synconium has only gall flowers and female ...

Those crunchies inside the figs are seeds, not wasp parts. And, if you’re wondering, fig jam is not sweet baby wasp paste. Nevertheless, vegans sometimes avoid figs since wasp critters are ...

The world's oldest known fig wasp fossil was identified from the Isle of Wright. ... the wasps each pollinate one of the 800 ore so modern tree species while ignoring the other fig trees.

Here’s how it goes. When a female pollinator wasp manages to sniff out a receptive tree, she lands on an unripe fig and makes her way into a tiny passageway that leads to a hollow core.