In Too Afraid to Ask, we’re answering all the food-related questions you’d rather not have loitering in the search history of your corporate laptop. This time: Do figs contain dead wasps?
I recently dropped a small fortune on a haul of purplish figs at the farmers market. What was I going to make? What wasn’t I going to make? Figs in a stunning caprese salad. Figs on yogurt with honey and pine nuts. Figs covered in bacon bits and maple syrup. Then, while doomscrolling, my fig dreams were crushed by one 56-word viral tweet. I learned that many figs are pollinated by fig wasps, and that those tiny bugs die inside each fleshy pod. The bounty in my fridge suddenly took on a sinister quality. I needed to know: Were all of my figs filled with dead wasps? The answer, I learned, is both yes and no.
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But first, what is a fig?
Figs have many secrets. They are actually inverted flowers. Each hollow ball of vegetal tissue is lined with hundreds of tiny buds that bloom inside the pod, says ecologist Mike Shanahan, author of Gods, Wasps and Stranglers: The Secret History of Fig Trees. The flowerettes in certain edible varieties produce a fruit-covered seed, which is what gives some figs their iconic crunch. Technically, they’re known as aggregate fruits, says Louise Ferguson, an extension specialist at the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences. In other words, the interior of each fig develops from hundreds of individual fruiting flowers.
How are figs pollinated?
These days many of the fig varieties that we buy in grocery stores and at farmers markets in the US don’t require pollination. Mission, those purplish-black ones I bought, Sierra, Celeste, Adriatic, Kadota, and the Brown Turkey fig can all self-pollinate, says Ferguson. But the Calimyrna, which has a yellow-green skin and is typically sold dried, requires fig wasps for pollination. “There’s no real way to tell from the outside, but if the fig contains seeds it will have been pollinated [by a fig wasp],” says Shanahan.
So, what’s the deal with fig wasps?
Because sweet, shy figs bloom internally, many of the 800-plus varieties across the world require an intimate type of pollination to ripen into an edible fruit. All figs are made up of both male and female flowers. But the ones we eat are generally harvested from dioecious species, says Shanahan. In these (about 400) varieties, all the figs on each tree behave as either male or female.
To pollinate these species, a female fig wasp, just a couple of millimeters long, forces her way into a nonedible, unripe male-behaving fig where she lays her eggs in the flowers. Along the way, her antennae snap and her wings are yanked from her body—“it’s a tight squeeze,” says Shanahan—leaving her no way out. Her wingless male offspring mate with the winged female offspring (yes, they’re sisters) before using their huge jaws to chomp tunnels through the fig that will allow the ladies to leave.
But before she bids adieu, that fertilized female wasp collects pollen from the male flowers. Then she squeezes out the engineered escape routes, leaving her brothers and mother for dead inside the fig. It’s her duty. Out in the world, she takes flight in search of specific figs, guided by smell, in which to lay her eggs. If the female wasp enters a male-behaving fig, the process repeats identically; she sacrifices her life to further the cause. But if she mistakenly burrows into a female-behaving fig, there’s no room for her to lay eggs. “She will only pollinate these flowers and will die without producing offspring,” says Shanahan. These pollinated flowers inside the fig pod then produce individual fruits and seeds, which ripen to attract seed-dispersing animals (to poop into more fig trees) and humans like me (to turn into baked custard).
