Wild strawberries are a delicious sweet treat, as long as you don’t mind the little rough seeds. But why are these “seeds” on the outside, when the seeds of many fruits, like apples, oranges, kiwis, and mangoes, are on the inside?
That’s actually a trick question. Aaron ListonWhy are what appear to be strawberry “seeds” actually fruit, said Dr. Schneider, professor and head of the herbarium in Oregon State University’s Department of Botany and Plant Pathology.
The small yellow or brown ovals on the outside of the strawberry are called achenes, and like most fruits, each achene contains a seed.
On average, a medium-sized strawberry Achenes 200 plants“When you eat a strawberry, you’re not just getting one fruit, you’re getting hundreds of fruits,” Liston told Live Science.
If the achene is the fruit, then what is the rest of the strawberry? In fact, strawberries are even more confusing. Not actually a berrythe fleshy mass is not a fruit but a swollen receptacle.
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Among the flowers container “What basically holds everything together is the substrate, the bed,” Liston says. “In the case of strawberries, the receptacle gets bigger, the fleshier it gets, the tastier it becomes. The receptacle gets bigger, but the fruit size doesn’t change. You’ll see that the fruit size stays pretty much the same from the green stage to the ripe stage.”
Typically, plant genes make the fruit grow into a pretty big, sweet treat, but in strawberries, “the genes that are normally expressed in the fruit are expressed in the receptacle,” Liston says. In other words, the genes that make the fruit fleshy and sweet are transferred from the fruit to the receptacle, making strawberries an attractive snack for animals, including birds, reptiles like turtles and snakes, and nearly all mammals, Liston says.
Given that the purpose of fruits is to spread the seeds of plants, strawberries have been extraordinarily successful. “I think they found a really neat evolutionary trick, and it worked,” Liston says. “Now you can find wild strawberries all over the world.”
Part of the fruit’s success is due to its structure: “Typically these achenes are not very strongly attached to whatever supports them, which facilitates dispersal.” Ardra Kachroo“These results are a testament to the work of the National Science Foundation, which has been working on this topic for about a year,” said David B. Schneider, program director for the National Science Foundation’s Division of Biological Sciences, told Live Science.
Few fruits have evolved quite like the strawberry (genus). strawberry), but its distant relative, the mock strawberry (Duchennea indica) look very similar. The two species shared a common ancestor about 20 million years ago, so they are thought to have evolved independently to become the same shape. Convergent evolution“But the imitation strawberries aren’t as sweet,” Liston said. “They taste like Styrofoam,” he added.
Strawberries, on the other hand, don’t rely solely on seeds to grow new plants: If conditions are poor and strawberry plants can’t spread their seeds, they can reproduce by runners, horizontal stems that branch out and form new plants.
