If you love figs, you may have heard some unsettling lore about them: that every fig hides a wasp, because these insects need to crawl inside and die in order for the fruit to grow. But are there really wasps in the figs we eat, or is this just a myth?
The answer is somewhere in between. Wasps do play an essential role in the life cycle of many types of fig trees, but most figs from the supermarket are likely bug-free.
“Fig trees and fig wasps are a great example of a mutualism,” Charlotte Jandér, a plant ecology and evolution researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden, told Live Science in an email. “Other examples of mutualisms include trees and the mycorrhizal fungi that help the trees take up nutrients, animals and their gut microbes, and flowering plants and pollinators in general.”
In the case of figs and fig wasps, the fruit gets pollinated and the wasp is able to reproduce, leading to a mutualism. But this relationship is rather complex.
What we think of as the fig “fruit” is actually a hollow structure called a syconium filled with tiny flowers. Generally, when a female fig wasp crawls inside a synconium from a female fig tree, she spreads pollen, which the plant needs in order to produce seeds and ripen. The hole that the wasp crawls in is very small, and she may lose her wings and antenna in the process and can even die inside the fig.
So, it’s possible that some types of figs may have dead fig wasps inside them.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean the figs we eat have wasps inside. Not all types of figs require pollination in order to ripen. Humans eat the fig species Ficus carica, which has several cultivars that are parthenocarpic, meaning they can produce ripe fruit without pollination — and therefore, without fig wasps.
“Most figs we eat in the US have no wasps inside them,” Carlos Machado, a biology professor at the University of Maryland, told Live Science in an email.
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