The Flaw in the Seedless Banana

Dorothy Hinshaw Patent
Nature’s Animal Ambassador

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You can see how little fruit is inside a wild banana.

     You probably eat bananas at least once a week—they are the most popular of all fruits, even surpassing the apple.  But have you ever noticed that bananas have no seeds?  Probably not.  You just peel them and enjoy their soft, seedless flesh without even thinking about seeds.
    
     If you’d been strolling through a tropical forest in New Guinea thousands of years ago and reached up to pluck a wild banana snack, you wouldn’t have wanted to eat it.  The banana ancestors had big hard seeds surrounded by a small amount of sweet flesh, not worth peeling.  Sometimes, however, plants appeared with fruit that had no seeds.  Over time, people cherished these seedless fruits and grew the plants for their own use.
    
     The banana plant sends up a central stalk surrounded by very large leaves, then flowers at the tip.  The flowers produce a heavy load of bananas without being pollinated.  Then the stalk dies.  Meanwhile, the stalk sends out side shoots that become new plants.  That’s a form of cloning, meaning that all of a banana plant’s progeny are genetically identical, both to their parent and to one another.
    
     The ancestors of the modern banana could reproduce in the usual way, so  their seeds contained mixtures of DNA from the mother plant and DNA from another plant’s pollen.  This “sexual reproduction” allows for the genes of the plants to be combined in new ways.  If a disease came along, it might kill most of the plants, but some others could have natural resistance and survive.
    
     Because it lacks seeds, the banana has gotten into trouble.  Back in the 1950s, an especially sweet and tasty variety called the Gros Michel was the commercial banana.  But a devastating fungus came along and killed the plants and contaminated the soil.  Growers then chose another variety, Cavendish, which resisted the disease.  But now a wilt called Panama disease has shown up that kills the Cavendish plants.  And because bananas lack genetic diversity and because they don’t develop seeds that mix up their genes, the Cavendish has no way of defending itself.  

​     Banana growers are doing what they can to stop the spread of the disease, however, and up to now they have been successful.  But don’t be surprised if in a few years the bananas you buy look and taste different.  Luckily, there are other varieties out there, like small “finger” bananas and larger red-skinned fruits, that you can already buy in places like Hawaii.

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These bananas are ready for harvest.

The banana flower cluster is huge. You can see the bananas beginning to form in the upper right of the photo.

Here are just a few kinds of bananas, from left to right—plantains, which are starchy rather than sweet; red bananas; finger bananas; and Cavendish bananas

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Dorothy Hinshaw Patent's new nonfiction picture book about horses has a fresh focus: how people over the ages have decorated horses in special ways. Organized into three categories—warfare and hunting, performance and competition, performance, and ceremony—the book introduces horses such as the chariot-pulling war horse of the Persians to the rose-decorated winner of the Kentucky Derby. For more information, click here.

Dorothy Hinshaw Patent is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom,  a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam.  Click here to find out more.

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MLA 8 Citation
Patent, Dorothy Hinshaw. "The Flaw in the Seedless Banana." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 21 Dec. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/ the-nonfiction-minute/The-Flaw-in-the-Seedless-Banana. Accessed 21 Dec. 2017.