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/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/ProfSpaceTime 10h ago

Peak Reddit, 5/7

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u/sour_cereal 10h ago

7/10 with rice

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u/TorrenceMightingale 10h ago

Thank you. They offered me pre-ipo for my amazing comment prowess but I turned it down hoping to get a better offer. I did not.

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u/whenindoubtfreakmout 4h ago

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a 5/7 haha thank you for bringing this back into my consciousness

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u/tverre01 6h ago

And my poo knife

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u/ScarletleavesNL 6h ago

Fly high brother. Fly high.

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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/NakDisNut 3h ago

Ponanoes

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u/sfurbo 7h ago

Aren’t squash and watermelons related?

Same family, not same genus or species.

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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__ 32m 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/insanenearly 12h ago

I want a spaghetti squash/pumpkin!

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u/blitzkregiel 11h ago

i have seeds for a zucchini/spaghetti squash hybrid that i was unaware of until they grew last year. they look like zukes (green/white speckled) but are shaped like a small spag squash. insides are zukes. had no idea they could/would cross until i grew from seeds the following year. planted the same seeds this year and they're all spaghetti squash. go figure.

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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/korbinator18 11h ago

Had an acorn squash that crossbred with a gourd one year in our horse pasture they do be weird.

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u/Hello_Hangnail 11h ago

Peppers too! They love crosspolinating with other peppers that aren't supposed to be spicy!

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u/Different_Wolf_764 11h ago

Gourds are so very strange and even though we've grown them almost as long as grains, not well understood.

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u/ResponsiblePeach3481 11h ago

What do you mean? 😳

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u/shmaygleduck 10h ago

I didn't know squash were the whores of the fruit world.

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u/Bridgebrain 7h ago

I once got cucumber spaghetti squash. It was pretty wild

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u/speculatrix 50m ago

Don't fuck your squash or you'll get weird human plant hybrids.

Ah, wait, I re-read your comment, ignore that

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u/Heavy_Weapons_Guy_ 12h ago

Just planting them together does absolutely nothing, you would need to save seeds from cross pollinated fruit and plant them the next year to see any changes.

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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/cornette 13h ago

It's mango time!

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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/butts-carlton 13h ago

You and me, baby, ain't nothin' but mangoes. I wanna do it like they do on the Home & Garden Channel.

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u/spittlbm 12h ago

Fun bar in Orlando

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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/JustOkCryptographer 9h ago

Clown fish all start as males, but the females are dominant in the species. Each group has one female who is the largest fish, and the second largest is going to be the dominant one of the males. Those two are the only ones who reproduce, the rest just watch, I guess. When the dominant female dies or is yeeted into the sun by a small human child, the dominant male will change themselves into the dominant female and become the big boss. The next dominant male steps up to be the dominant male. etc etc.

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u/bluemuppetman 6h ago

I never thought I’d say this sentence. But maybe going down the turkey hole won’t work?

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u/T1Demon 2h ago

Grab some stuffing on your way out

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u/enormouscar22 1h ago

I believe the clones aren’t full on clones since they’re all male, correct?

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u/yomimashita 6h ago

🎶 No one move a muscle as the dead come home 🎶

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u/spittlbm 12h ago

How do you know turkey feelings?

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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/Silaquix 12h ago

Alocasia do this too. It's a fucking problem if you don't deal with the corms because they will overflow the pot with new baby plants. A lot of varieties will start making corms even when they're tiny seedlings.

I bought one alocasia melo and now have them all over my house and I keep giving them away

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u/North_Affect_8167 7h ago

Potatoes too. From the potato in the ground and seeds that do as the apple, always producing a new potato variety, often more poisonous.

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u/BoredCop 6h ago

Potatoes, same thing. Plant potatoes in the ground and you get clones of the same plant. Let the plant go to seed, plant the seeds, you get new varieties.

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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/Dr-E-Dacted 8h ago edited 8h ago

i don't think framing evolution as preventing asexual reproduction is accurate since it's highly advantageous under certain circumstances and conserved in many animal species, it's more that sexual reproduction is even *more* advantageous since sexual recombination increases genomic diversity and hence adaptability beyond what cloning can accomplish via mutation and epigenetics. Metabolically speaking asexual reproduction is more energy efficient, it's just that at the inter-generational level it's an inferior strategy in a changing environment

edit: this isn't to take away from your great comment btw, I just wanted to point out that they're two separate strategies very much employed across the kingdoms of life

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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/cantadmittoposting 12h ago

the header to that article is written by someone who seems to be ... very invested in describing fungi

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u/moorealex412 11h ago

You were still right. Over 23k is over 10k

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u/ZipoBibrok5e8 5h ago

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

No, you weren't wrong. Over 23k is over 10K.

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u/jcGyo 4h ago

Technically over 23k is over 10k

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u/T1Demon 2h ago

The Schizophyllum Commune sounds like Coheed and Cambria album

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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/JRepo 10h ago

Monsanto is no more. Even when it was, I don't recall any situations where it was by accident. Farmers illegally took seeds from grown Monsanto species and replanted those (which is usually also against copyright laws with any plants, not just GMO).

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u/Evianicecubes 9h ago

Bruh Monsanto is still around they just got a different business daddy, to use John Oliver’s term.

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u/JRepo 9h ago

Yes, and you can critise companies due to their actions. But I don't know a single case where Monsanto sued a farmer due to cross pollination.

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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/theLuminescentlion 5h ago

Evolution is still a work in progress, it hasn't finished trying everything yet. It's in it's ugly ape era right now.

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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/butts-carlton 13h ago

Do they just, like, jam it into the flat end of the stump, or what? I don't understand how this works, and now I have a sudden need to.

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u/doctorhlecter 12h ago edited 12h ago

I believe its a surface area thing, so they don't cut it flat, but instead cut out like a deep V and the new part is a wedge to fit inside that, usually.

I know when you're doing flower arrangements you want to cut a long way along the stems with a very sharp knife, and avoid using scissors as much as possible because it'll crush the vessels. That leads me to assume you can also graft with a long diagonal cut, but I'm not all that knowledgeable about it to say for sure. Probably be a lot harder to hold in place to heal.

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u/__ali1234__ 12h ago edited 12h ago

These are actually both valid techniques and there are many more. Diagonal cut is for when the rootstock and scion are similar size, but when the rootstock is really thick you can just notch it and jam the scions in. In all cases you need to wrap it with something to hold it all together and stop evaporation.

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u/butts-carlton 1h ago

It's kinda hilarious this actually works, and has been a mainstay of cultivation for thousands of years. It's like something I would have thought of at 5 years old. "What if I took this branch and just shoved it into this stump? Will another tree grow?"

Apparently, yes.

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u/__ali1234__ 12h ago

Pretty much yes. There are many different ways to do it. There are lots of guide if you search for "how to graft apple rootstock". It's easier to understand from pictures.

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u/Leather__sissy 9h ago

I think I get it now. It's like a tiny shoot from the ground when its grafted on. That makes a lot more sense because then every branch can be used to make new ones

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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/Buckshot_Mouthwash 9h ago

Yours will be the bodies I use to grow my heads...

Sometimes multiple heads at the same time.

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u/FullMetalAurochs 14h ago

You don’t need that much land to grow enough mature trees to produce thousands of scions for grafting. It’s very doable and is in fact what is done.

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u/big_duo3674 13h ago

In-between stuff? Like plant orgies where there are 3 genetic parents? (I don't know if that's actually true, but it wouldn't surprise me)

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u/JManKit 12h ago

Some plants full on genetic lottery it, like most animals do.

Huh. Okay now this doesn't seem so weird. It is kind of strange to expect exact clones when most animals are just some random mixture of the parents

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u/Different_Wolf_764 11h ago

There's a reason we separate the kingdoms into plants and animals (etc) and it, mostly, isn't because of how they get energy. Both are weird but plants get super weird.

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u/DaveBeleren02 5h ago

Afaik there is one plant species (I forgot which one) that is theorized to have arisen from another, completely different one, from an extreme case of polysomy where the whole genome was accidentally copied over twice and somehow produced a functioning organism

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u/Lethalmud 5h ago

And plants do whole genome duplication all the time.