Multlple fruits are actually bunches of fruits
growing together, and each fruit has developed from its own flower. An aggregate fruit
derives from one flower with several pistils, but a multiple fruit develops when the
pistils of several distinct flowers mature and grow packed together.At the right you see some multiple fruits, some mulberries, of the
White Mulberry tree, Morus alba. One neat thing about that picture is that you
can see those little black, squiggly things on the bumps of which each mulberry
"fruit" is composed. Those squiggly things are the former flowers' stigmas.
That make sense because each "bump" was a former pistil in a flower. If you eat
a single mulberry you can be grammatically and botanically correct if you say "Those
fruits sure tasted good!"
Multiple fruits can be plan
weird. For example, at the left you see a fig I just plucked from a tree and cut down the
middle. You are seeing a cross section. The fig was attached to its twig by the projection
at the far left. In this picture the actual fig flowers are inside the thing you
are expecting to be a fruit. The flowers are so immature and enmeshed in the pink, pulpy
growth of the receptacle surrounding it that it's very had to see them. Notice
that in the center of the multiple fruit there is a cavity. The actual flowers grow so
that their tops are exposed to the cavity's open air. You can see some flower stems
radiating away from the flowers and the cavity, attaching to the surrounding yellow
receptacle. Note that at the fig's far right there appears to be an opening in the
receptacle. Among wild figs (this is a domesticated one) the cavities do indeed extend to
a hole formed in this area. Wild wasps enter through this hole, go inside the fig and walk
around atop the actual fig flowers gathering nectar, and in the process pollinate the
flowers. Domesticated figs such as the one illustrated have lost the ability to produce
fertile flowers and consequently seeds. Domesticated fig trees are reproduced by making
rooted woody cuttings from larger trees. The technical name for the precise kind of
multiple fruit the fig is, is syconium.
Though pineapples and figs are
the best-known examples of multiple fruits, if you look long enough in your neighborhood
you might also see the multiple fruits of Osage orange, shown at
the right (it's about the size of a softball), and mulberries, which are
both small trees sometimes found in North American towns. Both mulberries and Osage orange
belong to the fig family.
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