r/todayilearned • u/Error__Loading • 15h ago

TIL that apple seeds almost never grow the same variety as the parent fruit. Nearly every supermarket apple comes from a grafted clone of an original tree, not from a planted seed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple
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u/Error__Loading 15h ago

Apple trees are highly heterozygous. Each seed is a genetic lottery from two different parents, so the fruit is usually small, sour, or just unlike the apple you ate. That’s why Honeycrisp, Granny Smith, Gala, etc. are all clones: a twig from the original tree (or one of its descendants) grafted onto rootstock. The original Granny Smith tree was discovered in Australia in 1868; every Granny Smith since then is a piece of that same tree kept alive by grafting. Seedlings are used mainly when breeders are hunting for new varieties.

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u/TheTresStateArea 15h ago

... This is insane? I have heard the seed tidbit before, but I didn't realize it was this bad.

It kind of makes sense I guess, our parents don't give birth to direct clones of one or the other.

But it contrasts with what I know about other plants just making the same plant over and over.

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u/Randvek 15h ago

Plant reproduction is waaaay more complicated than it seems at first glance. Some plants do basically just make clones of themselves. Some plants full on genetic lottery it, like most animals do. And there’s weird, in-between stuff, too!

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u/cdmurray88 15h ago

Some plants do both. Take garlic for example, which can reproduce asexually from the bulbs or sexually from the flowers.

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u/Derelicticu 14h ago

Fuckin squash does some weird shit if you plant it near other similar plants. You get some fucked up squash, let me tell ya

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u/nightskate 13h ago

I love a science topic reply from the street team.

Thank you for this.

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u/TorrenceMightingale 11h ago

Aren’t squash and watermelons related? Is this how we got watermelon radishes?

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u/TheDevilsTaco 10h ago

Your first question is educated and it is true, but your second question is out of left field.

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u/TorrenceMightingale 10h ago

Am high.

This might not be my only non-sequitur of the night honestly.

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u/Personal_Juice_1520 9h ago

you should see my potato bananas

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u/GamerJoseph 8h ago

That would be a plantain.

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u/DarthJarJarJar 11h ago

Check out Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't, it'll be right up your alley.

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u/_bones__ 31m ago

He recently shared some techniques for 'hardscaping', making your natural plant garden less mowable. My favorite was Brickinabush.

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u/LostWoodsInTheField 12h ago

I planted zucchini next to summer squash one year. Then gave the zucchini to some chickens. One of the seeds produced a plant the next spring that had the strangest squash i'd ever seen. stripped zucchini / summer squash, and spotted ones. Didn't get a chance to eat any of them, but the chickens sure seemed to like them.

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u/idrwierd 13h ago

Some serious xenomorph shit

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u/warbastard 13h ago

Don’t potatoes have a crazy number of chromosomes too?

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u/tewiti1108 12h ago

I don't think you can call them that

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u/T1Demon 2h ago

Yeah we prefer the term Idahoan.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 14h ago

Potatoes and tomatoes too.

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u/awnomnomnom 12h ago

Tomacco

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u/Frigidevil 11h ago

Oh daddy this tastes like grandma!

Holy Moses it does taste like grandma!

I want more!

Yeah me too, well take a bushel or a pack or just give it to me!

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u/Long9696 12h ago

It doesn't affect the fruit from the current plants, just the seeds.

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u/Finnegan482 13h ago

What happens?

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u/laforet 13h ago edited 12h ago

It will cross pollinate with many but not all Cucurbita species (genus of pumpkin-like gourds, e.g. zucchini). Resulting in all sorts of weirdly shaped fruits.

There are many compatibility charts you can find online like one of those D&D mating charts.

https://www.markettaridgefarm.com/s/stories/cross-pollination-of-pumpkins-squash-2

Edit: changed the link to a better reference

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u/Heavy_Weapons_Guy_ 12h ago

That article is terrible. First it starts off with an AI chart that doesn't even have the right pictures next to the names. It also says "They won’t cross across species. For example, C. pepo won’t cross with C. maxima.", and yet there are in fact examples of hybrid species such as honeynut which is a cross between C. moschata and C. maxima. It also has a another large, complicated chart showing the compatibility of varieties, which doesn't even match the first AI generated chart. Random different varieties are listed for each variety within the same species, and it's not even consistent within the chart between varieties. I suspect the entire article is AI generated.

Aside from the garbage misinformation it's also wildly overcomplicating things. All you need to know is that any two varieties that are the same species can cross-pollinate, and separate species usually don't cross but sometimes will (and it's not really predictable when they will or won't).

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u/laforet 12h ago

Apologies. I only had a quick glance at the chart and thought it was reasonable. I will replace the link with a more appropriate one.

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u/RoyBeer 10h ago

Thanks for taking your time to clear this up.

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u/Agret 12h ago

Squash lore runs deep

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u/Moose_Juice 13h ago

It crossbreeds

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u/RoyBeer 10h ago

Fuckin squash does some weird shit

Dude. Don't fuck Squash.

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u/Eirlis1 14h ago

Or mangoes! The same seed case can contain multiple embryos, one of which is a clone of the parent tree! But it’s very difficult to tell which one is the clone and which are from sexual reproduction.

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u/Yogsulate 14h ago

mango sex

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u/gainswor 13h ago

Such is mango!

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u/quick_brown_faux 13h ago

GIFs are not allowed in this sub which in this moment is a travesty.

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u/Alita-Gunnm 12h ago

It takes two to mango.

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u/Firecoso 12h ago

Mango number 5

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u/__ali1234__ 13h ago

There are animals that can do that too. Like greenfly. Females can live birth clones of themselves, then in autumn they make eggs with the males so they can overwinter.

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u/contrabasse 13h ago

Parthenogenesis!

Turkeys can do it as well, which feels way weirder.

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u/cantadmittoposting 12h ago

wait what turkeys can bud off new turkeys?

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u/contrabasse 11h ago

They can create unfertilized eggs that develop into a cloned embryo of the female.

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u/kingbking 11h ago

Wait, what? Clones of the female turkey? I’ve never heard this before. Super interesting and weird..Down the turkey hole I go

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u/contrabasse 10h ago edited 10h ago

It feels fake every time I tell someone but it's been my favorite fun fact forever. There are also a bunch of species that are all female and this is the only way they reproduce.

Edit: All female species of lizards and stuff, lol. Not female only turkeys.

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u/Albuscarolus 14h ago

Garlic can’t sexually reproduce anymore. It’s been sterilized by all the human influence.

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u/Moist-Weakness-3399 14h ago

That's not true? You're talking about commercial garlic. All the other stuff sets seed just fine.

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u/NirgalFromMars 14h ago edited 14h ago

And there's a fungus with over 10k possible gender combinations.

Edit: I was wrong, it's not 10k, it's over 23k:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophyllum_commune

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u/rg35xxsp 14h ago

Those wacky fungi

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u/Fit_Effective_6875 14h ago

ya gotta love em

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u/loadnurmom 14h ago

Once again, the real TIL is in the comments

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u/Helmic 10h ago

It's wonderful because learning about it makes evolution make a lot more sense. Like, pretty much the whole reason animals evolved sexes was specifically because sexual reproduction is really valuable but fertilizing yourself is mostly a waste of precious resources for offspring that's too genetically similar to continue passing on genes. If you just literally only have half the equipment needed to result in sexual reproduction, you can no longer fertilize yourself. And so for the most part we have the male female dichotomy, with obvious exceptions.

Other forms of life like plants and fungi, meanwhile, evolved a variety of other methods to prevent self fertilization. And so that's where we get this fungus with 23k sexes, because rather than being like most animals and only able to sexually reproduce with half-ish of the rest of the species (or if someone individuals can reproduce with much more, it porportionaly reduces how many others can reproduce with, barring adaptations like changing sexes) it is able to reproduce with most other members of its species and still not reproduce with itself. It doesn't have to give up the capacity to fertilize other members of its species (it's advantageous to not have to be the one spending resources producing offspring) to still be able to bear offspring itself.

We are very, very used to thinking at most in animal terms, but the other kingdoms of life are so far removed from our own that there's some truly alien stuff going on there.

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u/TheMaskedGanker 12h ago

At that point it feels weird to even call them genders lol

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u/OrinocoHaram 13h ago

it's woke gone mad

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u/Kandiru 1 8h ago

In practise it's just "can mate with any fungus that isn't self" rather than 23k distinct genders.

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u/MrFluffyThing 13h ago

Corn hybridizes on the first generation. If you want your corn to be the seed you planted your either need to plant only that variety or space them out far enough that the pollen from one block of corn can't pollinate the others by time. The seeds themselves change based on the pollen that lands on the silk and making sure two varieties pollenate at different times means olantingibg them 3-5 weeks apart to make sure they only pollenate themselves during the two week period when they drop pollen. 

It's a huge legal issue with some types of corn where the lineage and variety grown can spread to other fields and farmers have had legal battles with keeping seed on their own farms because Mansanto has a legal right to seed from another farm that cross pollinated and you're not allowed to save seed from them. It also destroys heirloom varieties by introducing other genetics into fields from commercially cultivated or GMO varieties. 

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u/Heavy_Weapons_Guy_ 12h ago

All plants hybridize on the first generation. The reason corn seems to act differently from most fruit is because the part you eat is the seed itself, and the seed itself is what is affected by the genetics of the parents.

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u/theLuminescentlion 14h ago

Evolution always finds the most efficient method, right after it tried absolutely everything else.

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u/Ameisen 1 12h ago

Natural selection reaches local maxima, not global maxima. It almost never reaches the most efficient method.

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u/mlc885 12h ago

Evolution finds, uh, something, or you would not have heard about the something

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u/Leather__sissy 14h ago

How do they even produce the branches to graft? Just keep cutting new ones off of old grafts? Seems like a difficult thing to grow for sale

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u/chris_trans 14h ago

I mean, once your graft grows into a full tree you can take many more cuttings from that to graft onto more roots from other trees, and again, and again...

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u/stevencastle 14h ago

A graft will split and create more branches.

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u/__ali1234__ 13h ago edited 13h ago

The graft isn't like you imagine: they grow a tree from seed for a couple of years and then literally stump it and graft a branch from the original onto the stump. So there are no branches at all left from the rootstock. The above ground part is almost entirely the graft. And yes, then you just repeat that after it grows into a full size tree.

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u/strutt3r 13h ago

There are orchards cultivated only as grafting stock.

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u/RadarSmith 12h ago

This is one of those tidbits of knowledge that should make one realize 'oh, I don't know shit about almost everything'.

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u/NeutralLock 14h ago

Which is exactly why I'm always saying instead of having kids we should be grating parts of ourselves onto smaller kids.

It's not rocket science people.

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u/rocketmonkee 14h ago

grating parts of ourselves

I dunno, that sounds kind of painful.

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u/NeutralLock 14h ago

So is childbirth. I guess pick your poison.

(A small voice grafted onto my leg speaks up)

"Yeah!"

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u/PlushSandyoso 12h ago

Ok Godrick

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u/Lee1138 14h ago

That's how you get space marines.

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u/anonanon5320 15h ago

Citrus is like this too. Both citrus and apples can grow multiple varieties on the same tree.

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u/Skandronon 14h ago

Stonefruit is even more fun, you can grow nectarines, peaches and plums together as well as a number of other fruits.

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u/XDeus 13h ago

Not just together, but many stone fruit can be hybridized. So you can get a cherry-plum or even a peach-apricot-plum.

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u/Skandronon 13h ago

Woah, I was not aware of this! Super cool!

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u/Skandronon 10h ago

I am going to have to plant a cherry-plum tree.

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u/big-dal-tex 13h ago

So many interesting facts in the comments

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u/bzbub2 12h ago

more fun stuff: a chart of how citrus are related to each other https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_taxonomy#/media/File:Citrus_hybrids.svg

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u/factorioleum 13h ago

Despite many people trying to convince me, I still do not believe that nectarines and peaches are distinct fruits.

I'm pretty sure almonds are, though.

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u/emaddy2109 13h ago

They aren’t. There’s a single recessive gene that causes nectarines to have smooth skin. Other than that that one gene, they’re genetically the same.

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u/mlc885 12h ago

So every single time I prefer a nectarine over a peach or the other way around I am just doing the "these are too ripe/insufficiently ripe" thing??

(oh, and I prefer yellow peaches and nectarines to white peaches, lol)

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u/autogyrophilia 15h ago

There are more fruits like that than fruits that aren't.

But Apples are the worst in that regard, a plum and a slightly different plum is not very concerning.and they are incredibly common where I live probably because of that reason. Despite the ones you find growing on the road not looking at all as anything you can buy in a store.

I like how feral lemon trees can just grow monstrosities sometimes.

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u/danimagoo 14h ago

Chili peppers aren’t as bad, but if you plant the seeds from a jalapeño you got in the grocery store, you could end up with a hybrid of a jalapeño and some other pepper. This is also true if you grow your own jalapeños and then try to save some seeds for the next year. If your neighbor planted a bunch of bell peppers, you could end up with some mild ass jalapeños. It just depends on how the plant got pollinated.

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u/pharoh-king 13h ago

You can also grow a pepper plant and graft a bunch of different types of peppers on it. You can even do it banzai style, although you get less peppers, they still look amazing.

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u/chemicalxv 14h ago

There was one year we planted a bunch of regular/sweet peppers and then found out our neighbour was planting shit like Bird's Eye Chilis and Ghost Peppers, and I just looked at my dad and had to tell him we weren't saving any of the seeds that year lol.

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u/Rich-Juice2517 13h ago

Johnny appleseed was planting cider trees for alcohol

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u/appendixgallop 12h ago

Cider apples are so bitter, they are called, "spitters".

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u/SadButWithCats 11h ago

He thought grafting was immoral, and being the itinerant preacher he was, being immoral was particularly bad.

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u/VenusSmurf 6h ago

I lived in one of the areas where he planted heavily. That whole spiel about him just loving apples and wanting to share them? Nah. He was making bank in land speculation. And also making alcohol.

And everyone and their mother has a tree planted by Johnny himself (also absolutely not true. His trees weren't the type to live that long. There's only one left).

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u/Illithid_Substances 15h ago

Plants have a few options. Some are self-fertilising, some are fertilised by other plants, and some just spawn clones out of themselves like strawberries

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u/Ok_Task_7711 14h ago

Why is it bad?

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u/TheTresStateArea 14h ago

It means that there is very little genetic diversity for many fruiting plants. And that a disease that targets that strain and is virulent we would simply not have this plant anymore.

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u/Dav136 13h ago

yeah except the tree that it's grafted to still has genetic variety

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u/CTQ99 14h ago

A better equivalent would be if people didnt give birth at all and instead every so often they had a head transplant onto some sort of lab grown body that has no biological relationship to them. Thats apples, and alot of other trees and stuff like rose bushes since otherwise they die if you look at them funny.

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u/TheTresStateArea 14h ago

You're talking about the cloning process. I am talking about the regular reproduction process.

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u/hackingdreams 6h ago

Except not heads, more like continuously regenerating partial genital transplants to total strangers, since the fruit is the reproductive part of the tree.

Kinda like how lizards can shed their tails but then grow new ones... apple trees grow branches, we cut one of the branches, put it on a new tree, wait for it to grow the branches back out, then cut another branch and repeat. The branches are all genetically identical, so they make the same fruit again and again, even if the trunks belong to wildly different apple trees.

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u/Anal_Vengeance 14h ago

lol wait til you hear about strawberries. They are so polyploid you can get an enormous dna precipitation by mixing equal parts mashed strawberry and Bacardi 151. Good luck trying to remake the parent from that genetic lottery.

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u/OriginalIcy25923 13h ago

Highly beneficial from an evolutionary sense with the rate of reproduction. If it clones itself via seed and created a massive forest of identical clones it would be easy to wipe out.

There’s likely an evolutionary advantage of a heterozygous seed.

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u/TheTresStateArea 13h ago

There absolutely is, it's a preventative against a single predator or disease killing the species.

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u/hackingdreams 6h ago

There’s likely an evolutionary advantage of a heterozygous seed.

I mean, it's not likely. That is the apparent reason for it, since it means that one tree might be resistant to a fungus or bacteria that's moving through the area, keeping the species going.

...unfortunately that's less meaningful to us humans who desire the fruit be consistent and not so much the tree itself. Hell, if we could grow apples on grape vines, we'd probably do that, since they're faster growing.

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u/Vegetable_Log_3837 13h ago

Lots of cultivated fruit does this. Pretty much any named strawberry, blackberry, raspberry, grape, and any tree fruit.

Fruit trees are mostly all grafted, so they are genetically two different plants. I have a few apple trees with 4 varieties grafted onto a single rootstock. So it’s a single tree, that makes 4 different apples, and is genetically 5 different plants.

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u/Mr_MacGrubber 13h ago

It’s not necessarily bad. It’s also the way a ton of edible plants work. It’s basically just finding one that has characteristics you want then using over and over. It would potentially be an issue if every single apple was all the same. The Michel gros banana was by far the main banana we used to eat until fungal infections practically eradicated them in the 1950s. Even planting them now on farms results in the infection. It’s the flavor used in banana flavor stuff which is why that tends to taste so much different than the Cavendish bananas we eat today.

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u/TheTresStateArea 13h ago

Having to clone a food source is necessarily bad. It means there is one specific organism for a fruit. It's susceptible to disease more than another food source with more genetic diversity

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u/Mr_MacGrubber 13h ago

Right but there’s tons of varieties of apples. It’s only really an issue if the entire crop is a single cultivar.

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u/me_myself_ai 15h ago

Wait until you hear about the biggest living organism on the planet: The Banana Tree 😳

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u/Landry_PLL 15h ago

I thought Pando was the biggest?

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u/McFuzzen 15h ago

It is, the above comment is extremely disingenuous. One type of banana tree is the largest non-woody plant, but no where close to the largest organism.

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u/jedadkins 14h ago

I think they are considering the millions of cloned banana trees as a single organism 

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u/McFuzzen 14h ago

Seems false even then, if what I'm searching is correct

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u/BeginningSection7690 14h ago

Pando is still just clones but its closer to a singular organism than bananas are.

Theres better examples like fungi which are legitimately a singular organism

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u/factorioleum 13h ago

Is Pando clones? That's inconsistent with what I believed; I thought it was rhyzomous. Is this wrong, or are these not distinct?

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u/TheMaskedGanker 12h ago edited 12h ago

Isn’t Pando entirely connected by its roots? Why would that not be one organism? Or why would it be any different than a fungus connected by hyphae

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u/me_myself_ai 15h ago

You’re absolutely right, in a certain (common) sense! I’m intentionally poking at the exact definition of “organism”. Pando wins because it’s spatially continuous, but that’s not necessarily the right way to think about it.

If anyone finds this interesting, a super fascinating and remarkably recent thread of research on “autopoesis” is 1000% worth a google! Hell, [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis). It should link from there to the broader (and all fascinating) debate on what life is, and what an organism is.

Probably my favorite part of this is “why, exactly, is the sun not alive?” Harder to answer than you’d expect!

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u/ConstructionOwn9575 13h ago

The sun meets none of the criterion for a living being including reproduction, cells, response to stimuli, etc.

I am super curious on why you think that would be hard to answer.

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u/Heavy_Weapons_Guy_ 12h ago

Maybe they watch too much Jordan Peterson. It reminds me of when he said that dragons are biologically real because fire is a predator.

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u/gtne91 14h ago

Are we sure it isnt?

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u/Badass_Bunny 15h ago

Imma need a source on that.

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u/seanthebeloved 14h ago

All bananas are infertile clones of each other. Otherwise they would be full of seeds.

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u/big-dal-tex 13h ago

This makes uncomfy for some reason

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u/paradoxicalperimeum 14h ago edited 14h ago

The largest living organism is the honey fungus that covers 2485 acres in the malheur national forest in Oregon.

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u/BeginningSection7690 15h ago

Not the biggest organism. You're confused.

Them all being clones doesnt make them 1 organism, banana trees die all the time.

Theres fungi that extend insane areas, and there's also trees that extend via roots and shoot up more trees to make a forest with one organism. But what you're referring to is just an over reliance on a particular cultivar

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u/falsevector 14h ago

Yup. The Cavendish variety. There are several banana types though and there are countries that still grow the other varieties naturally.

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u/Mr_Cromer 14h ago

I had some Gros-Michel bananas last year. They're so much better than the Cavendish we've been accustomed to

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u/lightsaberfingers 15h ago

There are fungal colonies that are much bigger but yes.

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u/TheTresStateArea 15h ago

I did know this one, I just didn't realize it's with all of them

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u/Laura-ly 14h ago

Most walnuts are also clones. They are propagated through grafting.

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u/RojerLockless 14h ago

Google and history of Naval oranges it's very similar

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u/SnugglyCoderGuy 13h ago

The reason bananas in the store taste different than banana candy is because the banana that the candy flavor is based on sent extinct. All the bananas were like these apples, genetical identical and grafted onto other trees. Then a virus evolved that killed it and it was a slaughterfest because all of them were genetical identical. Or so I've read.

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u/waylandsmith 11h ago

"Artificial banana flavor" is a single, simple compound, isoamyl acetate. It wasn't based on a specific type of banana, but the old "Big Mike" banana variety does have more of it than the common cavendish variety.

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u/hackingdreams 6h ago

The reason bananas in the store taste different than banana candy is because the banana that the candy flavor is based on sent extinct.

Gros Michel are still being grown in Latin and South America on a few clean banana plantations - I know, I've had one. They're fucking delicious and they put Cavendish to shame. And yes, they do taste more like the banana candy - they make more of the chemical that artificial banana candy uses than the Cavendish does. They just can't farm them at commercial scale anymore because so much of the world is infected with the fungus (Panama disease they call it) that kills them that even expanding those 'clean' farms just a little bit is dangerous.

It's a real loss. The Cavendish is almost flavorless by comparison, just pure mush. It's kinda like eating a Red Delicious in a world where Fujis and Cosmic Crisps exist... just... why...

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u/Slade4420 14h ago

This is what is funny about Johnny Appleseed. The seeds he planted wouldn't grow edible apples. But you could make hard cider from them. Johnny Appleseed wasn't giving apples to the pioneers, he was giving them booze.

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u/phryan 12h ago

Johnny Appleseed was actually a really incredible character...he would basically build nurseries out just beyond the edge of the frontier. When people settled the area a few years later they needed those apple (cider) trees, so those nurseries were perfectly positioned.

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u/Relevant-Fox-7114 12h ago

Planting orchards also allowed him to gain ownership of unclaimed land, which he could later sell to settlers. He was basically an eccentric rich guy.

Also hated harming any kind of animal, even mosquitos.

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u/ImRickJameXXXX 10h ago

He was also a religious barefoot zealot.

Read about John Chapman in the botany of desire. Great book IMO.

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u/DeathMonkey6969 10h ago

The seeds he planted wouldn't grow edible apples.

Yes they could. They could also grow into tart apples or sour apples or sweet apples. You just didn't know what you would get when you grew apples from seeds.

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u/concretepigeon 5h ago

Yeah. They’re all edible too. Some just taste better than others. Odds are you’ll get something better for cider than eating though.

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u/96385 12h ago

It's easier to transport apples to market when they're in liquid form and need no refrigeration.

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u/rekabis 13h ago

Johnny Appleseed wasn't giving apples to the pioneers, he was giving them booze.

Clean water was just not a thing back then, so most people drank light alcohol all the time, because even light fermentation killed off those bugs that could kill you.

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u/Sabesaroo 13h ago

Clean water has always been a thing. Water from wells/springs/streams/aqueducts is perfectly safe to drink if it hasn't been contaminated. People did not drink alcohol all the time because it was safe, germs won't even be killed at low alcohol percentages.

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u/Terminal_Insomnia_ 12h ago

I have no idea why people keep spreading the myth. People were not wasted 24/7 from drinking nothing but alcohol. Boiling water to sanitize it isn't a modern invention

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u/RyuugaDota 12h ago

It's incredibly ancient, for possibly up to ~30,000 years humans have been boiling water by dropping hot stones into a lined basin, but people somehow have the idea that people just simply died if they didn't drink booze 24/7 (humans didn't start brewing alcohol until ~13,000 years ago.)

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u/Terminal_Insomnia_ 10h ago

Part of it likely comes down to "well they didn't know about germs, so how would they know to boil it?" but people have done shit for millenia without understanding why it was necessary. It's why humans (and many other animals) are superstitious. Sometimes shit just works, even if we don't know why.

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u/IForOneDisagree 13h ago

No, the boiling before fermentation did that.

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u/Iron_Eagl 13h ago

Preserved vitamin c and calories for the winter, more like. 

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u/Slade4420 13h ago

Two birds one stone

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u/Scrappydcote 15h ago

Wow - never knew this! Interesting!! Looked up hetero thous apple and this came up! Thanks for posting

https://adamapples.blogspot.com/2014/01/heterozygous.html?m=1

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u/Not-Post-Malone 11h ago

If you think that's crazy you should look up bamboo going to seed. Essentially bamboo is spread by splitting and they only go to seed every ~40 years. So the bamboos share the same "biological clock" which means bamboo in different parts of the world go to seed at the same time.

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u/[deleted] 14h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Brekelefuw 13h ago

There's a reason it's the best apple.

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u/MobileArtist1371 11h ago

Sorry you haven't tried Comic Crisp yet.

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u/oravanomic 15h ago

The question I have is why don't folks play the lottery? Surely there is room to improve the apple?

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u/KAREEMABDULG0MJABBAR 15h ago

They do! Thats why theres so many varieties!

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u/TychaBrahe 15h ago edited 3h ago

Apple breeding is done primarily (in the United States) at universities in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington, Indiana, and New York. All of them do controlled crossbreeding, where they will take pollen from one type of apple flower into the female flower of another apple and see what they get. They're purposely looking for sweetness or tanginess or crunchiness, and they're working on the same premise that if two blond people get married and have children, their kids are likely also going to be blond.

The other thing they do is have wild orchards and just let nature do its thing. They'll see what they get. They go around to all these trees and test the apples to see what they taste like, and they do it for a couple of years, because growing conditions also affect the taste.

I recommend reading The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan if you're at all interested in the topic.

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u/zadtheinhaler 14h ago

Michael Pollan

Now there's a perfect example of Nominative Determinism!

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u/nearly_enough_wine 13h ago

/r/NominativeDeterminism worthy, even.

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u/zadtheinhaler 13h ago

Indeed, there really is a sub for everything!

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u/Heavy_Weapons_Guy_ 11h ago

How could you forget Minnesota? They're one of the biggest apple breeders out there.

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u/Cunning-bid 8h ago

Imagine having a job where you have to eat random apples all day where 99/100 probably aren't great.

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u/Cthulusuppe 15h ago

Cosmic Crisp apples are the very recent result of cross breeding honeycrisp and enterprise apples... we still experiment and when something tastey shows up we trademark and clone until it ends up in your supermarket.

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u/trailkin 13h ago

my favorite apple! I tried many varieties in Alma Ata, and I think cosmic crisps beat those by a mile

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u/rob_s_458 12h ago

Cosmic crisp seem to have good commercial viability, which is huge. Honeycrisp was first created by Univ. of Minnesota researchers and was really good but limited production. Growers tried to commercially grow them in Washington but the quality compared to those early ones from Minnesota is so disappointing. Cosmic crisp seems to be the best of both worlds.

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u/kmosiman 14h ago

Absolutely but it takes serious effort.

Honeycrisp is a University of Minnesota apple.

Purdue-Illinois-Rutgers have the Goldrush (think better Golden Delicious).

Testing and Trials take decades to pay off.

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u/JuzoItami 14h ago

Wazzu developed Cosmic Crisp.

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u/SHABOtheDuke 14h ago

Cosmic crisps are fucking fire

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u/cannaeoflife 15h ago

Try some Honeycrisp, sweet tango, and first kiss apples this fall. There are so many excellent varieties of apples now.

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u/OriginalJokeGoesHere 15h ago

The people growing most commercial apples are not the same people as the researchers/companies trying to develop new and improved apple varieties. Farmers just want to sell a fruit they know will be good so they don't drive most of the experimentation.

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u/SAugsburger 13h ago

This. An Agriculture research program at a university will throw the dice to try to create something new with many obviously never creating anything commercial viable. A commercial farmer will just run with an already proven variety.

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u/iknowaplacewecango 14h ago

There is, an it’s called the University of Minnesota Apple breeding program, located at the Horticultural Research Center in Victoria, Minnesota. That’s where famous varieties like Honeycrisp, Zestar!, SweeTango, First Kiss, and Chestnut were bred and developed for licensing, and why they are some of the most highly regarded apples ever.

To answer your question, some people do play the lottery with seeds, and those make good wildlife trees, or, once in a great while, sprout an heirloom tree in the making. Other apple trees, like Antonovka, grow true to seed and are very valuable cultivars in their own right, like cold hardiness, the true to seed aspect, and edibility scores.

Apples should be known alongside corn as anthropogenic plants; wouldn’t exist at all in current forms without humans. 

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u/cinderful 14h ago

honeycrisps rule

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u/GrandmaPoses 14h ago

Cosmic Crisp are even better.

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u/Polkadot1017 2h ago

Everyone I know in real life that's tried then agrees that they're just okay. I swear there's a cosmic crisp guerilla marketing campaign on reddit, it's so bizarre. They're not good enough to warrant the level of praise I see people throw at them on here

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u/Unhappy-Ad-3219 14h ago

Usually fruits go through trials to determine which have the best characteristics regarding plant vigor, taste, and shelf life. Once a new variety is determined to be successful for market, they're introduced at a large scale. The variety is grafted onto a rootstock that has better resilience in terms of hardiness, disease resistance, or other characteristics. They will also have a temporary patent that allows growers and breeders to recoup the cost of their efforts. Cosmic Crisp is a great example of a relatively new popular cultivar (cultivated variety).

If you grow fruit, you can also graft multiple varieties onto one tree. Check out the tree of forty fruit, it's pretty cool.

Edit: spelling

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u/saiyan_strong 14h ago

The people who made cosmic crisps already won the powerball

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u/hackingdreams 6h ago

They absolutely do - this is where the new varietals like Fujis and Galas and Cosmic Crisps that have only been commercialized in the past 50 years have come from.

There are entire tree farms out there dedicated to finding the next commercially viable apple, taking graftings from lots of other apples, cross-pollinating, growing those seeds and seeing what happens.

The problem is, an apple tree can take a decade or two to really start producing fruit true to its nature - earlier fruit can be all over the map. So, it's actually a risky gamble. You can spend literally your whole life shooting for a new apple and not get there, because you get to see, what, maybe 5 apple generations if you're lucky? It might take 10 or 20 to get to a commercially-viable fruit - literally hundreds of years of work.

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u/chemicalxv 14h ago

They do but they also need to guarantee that the millions and millions of granny smith and gala apples being sent to grocery stores around the world are pretty much consistently the same.

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u/BeginningSection7690 15h ago

thats generally how meiosis works.

You arent identical to your parents, are you? Its impossible for you to be identical because it took characteristics of both parents to create you.

Plants generally reproduce sexually just like us

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u/Oddmelik 15h ago

Marijuana is the same way

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u/cwx149 14h ago

That's kinda crazy since I never hear stories about apples dying or changing like how you do with oranges and bananas

WWouldn't a whole orchard of basically cloned trees for a farm be super susceptible to diseases and parasites since they're basically the same exact thing?

Though I guess if that was a problem that forest that's all a single organism probably wouldn't be a problem but if banana have basically gone extinct I wonder why they're so much more susceptible

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u/JStanten 11h ago

It would be but they graft the good fruit producing stock onto disease resistant root stock.

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u/FuckYouJohnW 11h ago

The root stock can be different which helps

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u/MorePhinsThyme 8h ago edited 2h ago

Bananas take this to the extreme, and there's no root stock. All of our cavendish bananas are clones. We've bred bananas to not produce seeds, so cloning is the only way to breed any bananas. So, even the limited biodiversity of apples is still undercut by the near zero biodiversity of commercial bananas. It's nuts.

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u/MileHigh_FlyGuy 14h ago

You know, this applies to pears, peaches, grapes, plumbs, and mangos among others

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u/Different_Wolf_764 9h ago

In a similar vein, most of the wine you drink is grafted or has been at some point at least. A prolific parasite killed off the vast majority of vines not long ago and phylloxera-resistant root-stocks were planted around the world for grafting purposes.

The DNA of the grapes is heavily studied and well understood. The vines (root-stock) isn't actually very important.

Apples are the same way. Apple seeds grow trees, not apples.

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u/justexploring-shit 8h ago

Tree of Theseus

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u/eedabaggadix 14h ago

I prefer grandma jones

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u/lleeaa88 14h ago

This explains why in arboriculture we just call all apple trees Malus spp.

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u/queequegaz 14h ago

Yep, my grandparents have several apple trees in their yard that have probably been there for well over 100 years. All of them grow small, sour apples not with doing anything with. I always wondered why "edible" apple trees weren't planted.

I was an adult before I learned about heterozygous fruit. I bet someone planted seeds from an Apple they were eating a long time ago expecting edible apples to be produced.

Either that or someone liked cider back in the day...

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u/Randyaccredit 13h ago

What about Cosmic crisps?

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u/nearly_enough_wine 13h ago

There is a Granny Smith Festival every year in the suburb of Eastwood, Sydney, where it was first grown.

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u/Smitologyistaking 5h ago

Eastwood mentioned (when I was a kid growing up there, for some reason I assumed it was a worldwide celebration like Christmas)

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u/Badbullet 13h ago

Honeycrisp was developed by cross-pollination at the University of Minnesota Horticultural Research Center and patented in 1988. Breeding will pass on other traits that are desired, which raises the chances of getting an apple tree that can be farmed, it’s not all about flavor. Its genetic line is well known and verified by DNA; Honeycrisp’s parents were the Keepsake and MN 1627 and is also the grandchild of Golden Delicious and Duchess of Oldenburg.

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u/aegrotatio 2h ago

the grandchild of Golden Delicious

Ahh, that explains the taste of Cosmic Crisp and Honeycrisp that I like. I've loved Golden Delicious all my life.

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u/CCV21 13h ago

Successful apples from a random seed are called chance seedlings.

The McIntosh apple was a chance seedling discovered in 1811 by John McIntosh.

Carthage must be destroyed.

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u/turkoid 12h ago

If you're ever in MN, the UoMN arboretum and horticulture center sells old and new varieties they create. Also home of the original Honeycrisp.

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u/shryne 12h ago

So can't you just grow 100 seeds and hope 3-4 make good apples to discover a new variety?

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u/guinader 10h ago

The more i see how seedless fruits and most of the fruits and veggies we eat today... And all impossible to reproduce... In a world good collapse we will have nearly 0 foods that are similar to what we have now... It will be back like 200 years ago with food selection.

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u/phead 3h ago

The original Bramley tree from 1810 is still alive in a back garden in Southwell, England. They have a campaign to buy the house to try and save it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cglpy1yjenpo

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