How do seedless fruit grow?
In: Biology
It depends on what you mean. There are a couple of different ways to address your question, so I’ll generalize with examples of (arguably) a couple of the most common examples…
**Bananas**: Bananas are a rhizome, meaning that all bananas are genetically from a single plant. To start a new Banana tree, you take a healthy clipping from an existing tree and add it to water until it grows roots. (As a clarification, there are actually different kinds of Bananas, so each KIND of banana would come from the same plant.)
**Seedless Watermelons:** If you pay close attention, you will notice that seedless watermelons actually do contain seeds. But the seeds are poorly formed and immature. Seedless watermelon plants come from a strain of seeds that have been bred specifically to produce fruit with the trait of poorly formed, immature seeds. So the seed that grew the plant was a good seed, but you can’t use seeds from seedless watermelons to grow a new plant.
As a side note, most fruit that you buy in the grocery store is specifically bred to possess the trait of good fruit. Most seeds found in the fruit you buy from a store is not really viable to grow more plants with good fruit.
They’re all clones of each other. Each time they want a new plant they take a clipping from one and grow it out. So each plant is genetically identical
Some fruits are “ripe” for human consumption prior to actually being fully developed, and science has pushed that a little further. Seedless watermelon, as stated in a proper post, are a good example of this.
The other kind are fruit varieties that are capable of producing fruit without successful “sex” (term I’m using only for simplification), but because of the lack of successful “sex”, the fruit so created is seedless. These fruits are varieties that are “parthenocarpic” plants. As mentioned in another poster’s reply, planting plants that are parthenocarpic in proximity to only genetically identical clones creates a situation in which they cannot reproduce correctly, causing them to generate seedless fruit.
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