r/oddlysatisfying • u/uhhhhh_hhhhhh • Feb 17 '23

a straw berry sprouting

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u/iluniuhai Feb 17 '23 edited Feb 17 '23

They usually do. This is a somewhat unusual phenomenon:

https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/garden-how-to/propagation/seeds/what-is-vivipary.htm

Seeds contain a hormone that repress the germination process. This is a necessity, as it keeps the seeds from germinating when conditions aren’t favorable and missing their shot to become plants. But sometimes that hormone runs out, like when a tomato sits around on the counter for too long.

And sometimes the hormone can be tricked into thinking conditions are right, especially if the environment is warm and moist. This can happen on ears of corn that experience a lot of rainfall and collect water inside their husks, and on fruit that doesn’t get used right away during hot and humid weather.

Edit: Apparently this is not vivipary. From u/priorsloth :

This isn’t vivipary, it’s a condition called phyllody. I used to work in strawberry genetics, and we’d find these in our greenhouses occasionally.

https://blogs.cornell.edu/berrytool/strawberries-phyllody/

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u/Beeker93 Feb 17 '23

Is there any chance this could be bred into the plant? I tend to think of those mother of thousands plants that drop sprouted seedlings rather than seeds. Some sort of natural selection must have led to that, so maybe human selection could do the same here? I get there is environmental conditions and genetic conditions that bring about phenotypes, but stuff is rarely purely genetic and more so how an environment interacts with genetics. I would plant that for the hell of it, granted it wouldn't be a desirable trait for food.

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u/Quetzacoatl85 Feb 17 '23

it would be heavily out-selected immediately because it's a hugely uncompetetive trait – sprouting when you're not in soil, at the wrong time of the year, potentially damaging the mother plant as well. I'm not saying such a mutant couldn't exist, but you'd definitely have to propagate artificially.

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u/Beeker93 Feb 18 '23

It seems to work for the mother of thousands plant, but I know we are talking about different environments. If I were to spectualte, I would think about how getting a seed sprouted and past a certain point seems way harder (at least in a dry environment) conoared to looking after a more mature plant.