Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Figs, Ctd

Christina Agapakis updates her fascinating post by linking to another by Christie Wilcox. In it, Wilcox explains how some fig species fight back against freeloading wasps that try to use the plant without pollinating it:

First off, the figs carrying cheater offspring were aborted more frequently. When a fig aborts a larvae-containing fruit, it kills all of the larvae inside. One active species only kept around 3% of the number of figs that the passive pollinated species did. But to punish them even more, the fig also manipulated the conditions within the growing fruits which contained cheating larvae - per fruit, fewer cheater adults emerged than non-cheating ones. In one species of fig, almost no cheaters survived to adulthood - just 5% of the number that emerged from passively pollinated figs. How exactly the fig changes the condition of the fruit to harm the growing larvae isn't yet known.

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