As crazy as it may sound, bananas can not reproduce

A light topic for a beginning of our weekend, bananas. One of my favorite fruit because no smoothy is a smoothy if it does not have a banana in it. From cakes to drinks, bananas can also be eaten fresh or dried as a healthier version of chips. I chose to write about bananas today because they are shaped like a smile which goes lovely with that entire philosophy of happiness thing that I have going on and after

Hive account@eco-alex made a theme As crazy as it sounds... between writing about an animal who poops little cubes and bananas not having sex, I chose bananas. Maybe cube-shaped poop will be covered in some other post, sexual inadequacy of bananas it is.

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Poor bananas, no "cigarette after" for them. I do have to make something clear, that title of mine is a bit misleading. If bananas could not reproduce there would be no bananas. The logic is pretty simple, some kind of reproduction is needed to create an "offspring". From an asexual reproduction of bacteria and viruses, cell division (mitosis, meiosis), and autogamy or self-fertilization to sexual reproduction there is never something out of nothing. One and one may not always be needed to create three but at least some form of one needs to be there. So, in all fairness, bananas are reproducing, they just can not do it alone and need help from humans. As crazy as it may sound, humans may be considered banana pimps.

Yeah, bananas are actually berries, who would have thought? Not me. The word banana comes from the Arabic word "banan," meaning finger, they are cultivated in tropical and subtropical areas around the world and most of those cultivations are scientifically known as Musa acuminata, Musa balbisiana, and Musa paradisiaca. The banana plant is not actually a tree. It is often mistaken for a tree because of its size (3 meters in height) but nope, not a tree, just the largest herbaceous flowering plant. That which people mistake for a trunk of the tree is a "false stem" or pseudostem.

The world’s most consumed fruit

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People love bananas. They are the worlds most exported fruit with 114 millions of metric tons produced each year. If you were wondering who eats them the most, that would be Rwanda. In that country, 5 bananas are eaten every day by every person. 95% of bananas that are sold are of Cavendish variety and they are picked while still green because the ripening process takes place at special facilities and last only 5 days. With Ecuador being the top exporter and USA the top importer, this fruit is enjoyed all over the world.

Oh and, if you are worried about those brown spots that bananas get, don't be. When a banana comes in contact with airborne hormone ethylene, the acids in it start to break down and the green chlorophyll pigments are broken up and replaced with a yellow hue. Since bananas generate a large amount of ethylene as they ripen, it causes the yellow pigments in bananas to decay into brown spots, a process called enzymatic browning. The degradation of chlorophyll causes the accumulation of a fluorescent product in the skin of the fruit so bananas glow fluorescent under ultraviolet light which allows animals which can see light in the ultraviolet spectrum to recognize that the fruit is ripe and safe to eat.

Fact check everything you read...

There was a study in Japan that many wrongly consider a proof that bananas cure cancer. Spoiler alert - they don't. In that study, researchers injected the mice with a filtered extract of a very ripe banana in water. The immune systems of the mice produced tumor necrosis factor as part of the normal immune response to dealing with something that should not be there. It is a protein that causes inflammation as part of the body's natural defenses. Scientists made absolutely no claim that they have found a cancer cure. I am not saying that bananas are not healthy and that you should not eat them, they sure do have some benefits for your health but do not rely exclusively on them to cure you. You can read the research here:

Differences in Biological Response Modifier-like Activities According to the Strain and Maturity of Bananas by Department of Medical Life Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Teikyo University, Sagamiko-machi, Sagamihara-city, Kanagawa 229-0195, Japan

When you look at a banana, what does it remind you of? If possible, try not to sound like a pervert. If you are a man and have a curved thingy, that is an anomaly. Those things are usually straight, not curved. Bananas can be seen as a crescent moon or as I like to see them, like a smile. Big yellow shining smile. There is a reason why they are shaped like that.

The process of negative geotropism

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Bananas come from the rainforest, a place with little sunlight. They adapted and evolved in order to survive. Plants naturally turn to sun and so does banana. It is curling up against its own weight to get more sunlight and as it grows, it becomes too heavy and starts sinking to the ground creating that lovely smile shape. The answer to why are bananas shaped like a smile question is therefore simple. Because of evolution.

I have already mentioned how the Cavendish variety of banana is the one that we all know and love. It was chosen because it is resistant to fungus, most of it anyway, there is still that TR4 that is damaging Asian crops and spreading but other fungus are powerless when it comes to banana. The thing about Cavendish is that it is seedless and must be cloned by farmers.

Cavendish variety as a hybrid of
Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana

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Musa acuminata produces unpalatable fruit flesh and Musa balbisiana has to much seeds. They occasionally cross-pollinate and spawn seedlings which grow into sterile, half-breed banana plants and some ten thousand years ago, humans discovered that this new hybrid had great taste. Agriculturalists cultivate the plants by suckering shoots and cuttings taken from the underground stem. Opinions differ on how long the Cavendish variety will survive because there is danger from pests. Even though banana plants are clones, they can occasionally be "persuaded" to produce seeds through a process of hand pollination. Only one fruit in three hundred will produce a seed, and of these seeds, only one in three will have the correct chromosomal configuration to allow germination. Hope lies in the genetic modification and Belgian scientists have already become skilled in using DNA-transfer to introduce disease-resistance genes directly into the plant’s genome. See... I told you humans were banana pimps... :)