04-22-2017, 10:18 PM
(04-22-2017, 10:10 PM)AustinLB90 Wrote: I think the strangest event with a teacher is when one teacher of mine responded to my class complaining about pollen floating around with "pollen is tree sperm" to gross my class out. I now from this point forward tend to call pollen tree sperm.
That teacher is correct though. The male tree releases pollen to fertilize nearby female trees and maintain genetic diversity in the species as new seeds are produced.
Interestingly enough, bananas being seedless means that they don't make pollen and have no such genetic diversity. A single disease could drive them to extinction practically overnight.
And this already happened once before, that's why 'artificial banana flavor' doesn't taste like real bananas. The artiicial flavor was developed to resemble the older type of banana that is now extremely rare and expensive with very few plants surviving.
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