This video is sponsored by Squarespace. At some point, someone in your life who was
probably trying to gross you out and may have told you something. They may have said, "Hey,
any fig you've ever eaten in your life had teeny tiny little dead wasps inside it."
Well, I've got good news and bad news about that. The good news is that's false. Not ALL
figs have tiny little dead wasps inside them... But if the fig or fig product is kind of crunchy,
then you are probably eating some dead wasp remains, though the crunch is not the wasp itself.
The crunch is the seeds the wasp helped to fertilize, and there's nothing dangerous
or unnatural about it. Figs just be like this, because figs are not actually fruits and therefore
they need some extra pollination help from wasps. The figs we eat are actually swollen stems
containing potentially thousands of individual flowers that each produce a tiny little fruit.
This is why you never see a fig tree blooming. It blooms internally. The fig starts as a little
green nubbin and it gradually swells up as the flowers grow inside it. Here's a really immature
one I'll cut open. Inside, you can see all the hundreds or thousands of little individual flowers
starting to grow. The female flowers all have a teeny little ovule inside them, an unfertilized
egg. Here's a fig that's a little further along. And if I kind of turn it inside out,
you can see how the fig is really an inverted flower, or an in fluorescence. It's many little
flowers all clustered together, like broccoli. 70 to 90 million years ago, fig trees and fig wasps
evolved a very strange intimate, close and mutually beneficial relationship.
The details vary a lot from tree species to tree species and from wasp species to wasp
species. But here's generally how it shakes out. Female fig wasps are born inside figs. As they
crawl out of the fig, they pick up some pollen from the male flower parts inside the fig. Then
they fly around and eventually land on another fig and they enter it through what looks like the
blossom end there. Most fruits have a little belly button where the flower used to be. But remember,
figs are not fruits and there was no flower. That's called an ostiole on a fig. And it kind
of has a doorway that you can see really clearly in cross section under the microscope — those
bratcs — little specialized leaves that serve as a one way door. The female pushes her way through
that little door. And once she's inside the fig, she lays her eggs. And as she's crawling around in
there, she ends up distributing pollen. Remember, she's covered in pollen because she was born in
another fig. The fig and the wasps grow together. Eventually the wasp eggs inside hatch. The little
babies eat some of the sweet, sweet sugar in there. The males just look like little ants. They
mate with their sisters. They bore tiny tunnels out of the fig, crawl away and promptly die.
The females eventually emerge out of the holes their brother mates so kindly dug out for them.
They fly away covered in pollen and the circle of life, et cetera, et cetera. Who is unaccounted for
in this story? The mama wasp. She died inside the fig. Her job was done after she laid her eggs. She
just died in there. And the fig totally recovers from all of this action going on inside it.
The relationship between fig and wasp is symbiotic, not parasitic. The alien from
the "Alien" movies was inspired by some related wasps that lay their eggs inside other insects.
The babies eventually eat their way out of their hosts, killing them. That is parasitism. This
is mutualism. And that's why vegans generally consider figs to be vegan, even though an animal
dies in the production of figs. The thing is, it's totally natural. It's what the wasp "wants" to do.
After the babies are born and they tunnel their way out, the fig that their mama fertilized
just heals. It releases an enzyme called ficain that dissolves the dead mama wasp inside and any
wasp eggs or babies that didn't make it. The fig uses those dissolved nutrients. So no, a crunchy
fig is not crunchy because of bug parts. It's crunchy because the fertilized ovules grew into
seeds — delicious, oily little seeds. I used to love the crunch of Fig Newtons when I was little.
Man, I forgot how good these are. But hold on, wait a minute. These are not crunchy. I don't
know when this happened, but apparently, Fig Newton figs don't have seeds in them anymore,
despite the fact that the seeds are clearly shown on the box. I suppose they could be filtering the
seeds out of the figs at the factory. Maybe they did some market research that told them consumers
are grossed out by the crunch because they think the crunch is bug parts, even though it's not.
But there's another potential explanation as to why there aren't any seeds in here anymore.
They might have started using figs from parthenocarpic fig trees. Parthenocarpic figs,
like this common fig variety we've been looking at, have a mutation. And this mutation allows them
to set fruit without being pollinated. Normally, if a fig doesn't get pollinated by a fig wasp,
the tree just drops the fig before it even matures. There's no point in the tree wasting
any of its sweet, sweet sugar on a fig that isn't going to help it reproduce. And that's
exactly what happened when people introduced the Smyrna fig to California in the late 19th century.
The trees just wouldn't set fruit. Despite this SoCal climate to being identical to that of their
native Mediterranean region, there were no fig wasps to pollinate the fruit in California. So
farmers had to import wasp-infested figs to hang up in their orchards in bags or on strings. This
is actually an ancient farming practice called caprification, but not all fig tree varieties
need to be pollinated in order to set fruit. There are ones that have this mutation and they
will set the fruit regardless of whether it has been pollinated. And this is bad for the tree,
right? The tree is wasting energy on fruit that will not help it to reproduce.
So why would this mutation have persisted in the population of trees? Well, it might have
been due to human intervention. These trees tend to be more productive, and you don't
have to really worry about pollinating them, so people might have grown them intentionally
from clippings rather than from seeds, because in many cases they wouldn't have had any fertilized
seeds. Look inside this mature parthenocarpic fig. It has no seeds. Those little brown things
are just the shriveled empty unfertilized ovules. They have none of the tasty oils
that fertilized seeds grow to feed the new baby tree. This fig could not help its tree reproduce.
It had no purpose other than to feed me. In 2006, a couple of Israeli archeologists and a Harvard
anthropologist published a paper on figs. And this fig completely rocked the world's understanding
of the history of agriculture and civilization itself. They found remains of parthenocarpic fig
trees in an Early Neolithic village near the river Jordan. They argued that the trees were grown by
people from clippings rather than seeds because parthenocarpic fig trees grow unfertilized,
seedless figs. So it must have been people who did it. And this finding was a huge deal because
the trees in question lived more than 11,000 years ago, almost a millennium before people first
started domesticating grains and legumes. The authors here argued that figs were the first crop,
and their findings were picked up in the popular press. It was big news. But then
some Israeli botanists came forward and said, Hey, just because the fig is parthenocarpic
doesn't mean it can't reproduce without human intervention. It's still possible for the fruit
to be pollinated by a wasp. It just doesn't have to be pollinated by a wasp before it develops.
Therefore, we don't know for sure that these 11,000 year old trees were intentionally
cultivated by humans. But here's something we do know. If you get a fig that does not have any big
crunchy seeds inside it, then there's a good chance that there are no dead wasp remains in
there either. If all you've got are those aborted little ovules, then the seeds were not fertilized,
which means a wasp probably never got inside the fruit. Maybe one did and it just didn't fertilize
the fruit before it died. There are some wasps that only feed on the fruit. But this is my tree
and I've been watching it for a year for any sign of fig wasps just so that I could make this video,
and alas, none ever arrived. These are just ants looking for sweet, sweet sugar — as I am,
I suppose. Parthenocarpic figs probably don't have dead wasps inside them. And these are some of
the most popular modern commercial fig varieties because they're super productive and pollination
is something the farmer would rather not have to worry about. So not all figs have dead wasps,
#notallfigs. But just remember, there's nothing wrong with the figs that do have little dead
wasp remains inside them. The fig digests the wasp long before you digest the fig,
and connoisseurs generally prefer those figs because they have those delicious, crunchy seeds
in them that are now sadly lacking from Fig Newtons, at least in this particular package.
In contrast, there's nothing lacking from Squarespace, the sponsor of this video.
Squarespace has everything you need to sell anything on the internet.
First, you create your website. They have templates and it's easier than
ever now to customize them to your needs. Everything is drag and drop.
Second, start selling. Create product pages and take people's money. Create online schedulers
for appointments or classes or even paywall some content. Third, market your business. Squarespace
has all the tools inside it to do email marketing campaigns and social media blasts. So many small
business people have done just that, including me. I've done merch sales through Squarespace.
And they have enterprise solutions for large businesses too. And if you have no business,
you can publish a simple personal bio site for free with Squarespace. It's also free to
start working on any design, but when you pay to publish your site or to register a domain name,
use my code RAGUSEA and save yourself 10%. You'll be doing me a solid. Thank you,
Squarespace. And I can't believe I'm saying this, but thank you, fig wasps. Apparently the
major species in the family don't actually have stingers, so they have that going for them.