Figs have tiny dead wasps inside them

Not ALL figs have tiny little dead wasps inside them

But if the fig or fig product is kind of crunchy, then you are probably eating some dead wasp remains, though the crunch is not the wasp itself. The crunch is the seeds the wasp helped to fertilize, and there's nothing dangerous or unnatural about it. Figs just be like this, because figs are not actually fruits and therefore they need some extra pollination help from wasps. The figs we eat are actually swollen stems containing potentially thousands of individual flowers that each produce a tiny little fruit.

This is why you never see a fig tree blooming. It blooms internally. The fig starts as a little green nubbin and it gradually swells up as the flowers grow inside it. Here's a really immature one I'll cut open. Inside, you can see all the hundreds or thousands of little individual flowers starting to grow. The female flowers all have a teeny little ovule inside them, an unfertilized egg. Here's a fig that's a little further along. And if I kind of turn it inside out, you can see how the fig is really an inverted flower, or an in fluorescence.

It's many little flowers all clustered together, like broccoli. 70 to 90 million years ago, fig trees and fig wasps evolved a very strange intimate, close and mutually beneficial relationship. The details vary a lot from tree species to tree species and from wasp species to wasp species. But here's generally how it shakes out. Female fig wasps are born inside figs. As they crawl out of the fig, they pick up some pollen from the male flower parts inside the fig. Then they fly around and eventually land on another fig and they enter it through what looks like the blossom end there. Most fruits have a little belly button where the flower used to be.

But remember, figs are not fruits and there was no flower. That's called an ostiole on a fig. And it kind of has a doorway that you can see really clearly in cross section under the microscope — those bratcs — little specialized leaves that serve as a one way door. The female pushes her way through that little door. And once she's inside the fig, she lays her eggs. And as she's crawling around in there, she ends up distributing pollen. Remember, she's covered in pollen because she was born in another fig. The fig and the wasps grow together.

Eventually the wasp eggs inside hatch. The little babies eat some of the sweet, sweet sugar in there. The males just look like little ants.

They mate with their sisters.

They bore tiny tunnels out of the fig, crawl away and promptly die. The females eventually emerge out of the holes their brother mates so kindly dug out for them. They fly away covered in pollen and the circle of life, et cetera, et cetera. Who is unaccounted for in this story? The mama wasp.

She died inside the fig. Her job was done after she laid her eggs. She just died in there. And the fig totally recovers from all of this action going on inside it. The relationship between fig and wasp is symbiotic, not parasitic. The alien from the "Alien" movies was inspired by some related wasps that lay their eggs inside other insects. The babies eventually eat their way out of their hosts, killing them. That is parasitism.

This is mutualism. And that's why vegans generally consider figs to be vegan, even though an animal dies in the production of figs. The thing is, it's totally natural. It's what the wasp "wants" to do. After the babies are born and they tunnel their way out, the fig that their mama fertilized just heals. It releases an enzyme called ficain that dissolves the dead mama wasp inside and any wasp eggs or babies that didn't make it. The fig uses those dissolved nutrients. So no, a crunchy fig is not crunchy because of bug parts.

It's crunchy because the fertilized ovules grew into seeds — delicious, oily little seeds. I used to love the crunch of Fig Newtons when I was little. Man, I forgot how good these are. But hold on, wait a minute. These are not crunchy. I don't know when this happened, but apparently, Fig Newton figs don't have seeds in them anymore, despite the fact that the seeds are clearly shown on the box. I suppose they could be filtering the seeds out of the figs at the factory. Maybe they did some market research that told them consumers are grossed out by the crunch because they think the crunch is bug parts, even though it's not.

But there's another potential explanation as to why there aren't any seeds in here anymore. They might have started using figs from parthenocarpic fig trees. Parthenocarpic figs, like this common fig variety we've been looking at, have a mutation. And this mutation allows them to set fruit without being pollinated. Normally, if a fig doesn't get pollinated by a fig wasp, the tree just drops the fig before it even matures.

There's no point in the tree wasting

Any of its sweet, sweet sugar on a fig that isn't going to help it reproduce.

And that's exactly what happened when people

Introduced the smyrna fig to california in the late 19th century.

The trees just wouldn't set fruit.

Despite this SoCal climate to being identical to that of their native Mediterranean region, there were no fig wasps to pollinate the fruit in California. So farmers had to import wasp-infested figs to hang up in their orchards in bags or on strings. This is actually an ancient farming practice called caprification, but not all fig tree varieties need to be pollinated in order to set fruit. There are ones that have this mutation and they will set the fruit regardless of whether it has been pollinated. And this is bad for the tree, right? The tree is wasting energy on fruit that will not help it to reproduce. So why would this mutation have persisted in the population of trees? Well, it might have been due to human intervention. These trees tend to be more productive, and you don't have to really worry about pollinating them, so people might have grown them intentionally from clippings rather than from seeds, because in many cases they wouldn't have had any fertilized seeds. Look inside this mature parthenocarpic fig.

It has no seeds. Those little brown things are just the shriveled empty unfertilized ovules. They have none of the tasty oils that fertilized seeds grow to feed the new baby tree. This fig could not help its tree reproduce. It had no purpose other than to feed me. In 2006, a couple of Israeli archeologists and a Harvard anthropologist published a paper on figs. And this fig completely rocked the world's understanding of the history of agriculture and civilization itself. They found remains of parthenocarpic fig trees in an Early Neolithic village near the river Jordan.

They argued that the trees were grown by people from clippings rather than seeds because parthenocarpic fig trees grow unfertilized, seedless figs. So it must have been people who did it. And this finding was a huge deal because the trees in question lived more than 11,000 years ago, almost a millennium before people first started domesticating grains and legumes. The authors here argued that figs were the first crop, and their findings were picked up in the popular press. It was big news. But then some Israeli botanists came forward and said, Hey, just because the fig is parthenocarpic doesn't mean it can't reproduce without human intervention. It's still possible for the fruit to be pollinated by a wasp. It just doesn't have to be pollinated by a wasp before it develops.

Therefore, we don't know for sure that these 11,000 year old trees were intentionally cultivated by humans. But here's something we do know. If you get a fig that does not have any big crunchy seeds inside it, then there's a good chance that there are no dead wasp remains in there either. If all you've got are those aborted little ovules, then the seeds were not fertilized, which means a wasp probably never got inside the fruit. Maybe one did and it just didn't fertilize the fruit before it died. There are some wasps that only feed on the fruit. But this is my tree and I've been watching it for a year for any sign of fig wasps just so that I could make this video, and alas, none ever arrived. These are just ants looking for sweet, sweet sugar — as I am, I suppose.

Parthenocarpic figs probably don't have dead wasps inside them.

And these are some of the most

Popular modern commercial fig varieties because they're super productive and pollination is something the farmer would rather not have to worry about.

So not all figs have dead wasps, #notallfigs. But just remember, there's nothing wrong with the figs that do have little dead wasp remains inside them. The fig digests the wasp long before you digest the fig, and connoisseurs generally prefer those figs because they have those delicious, crunchy seeds in them that are now sadly lacking from Fig Newtons, at least in this particular package. In contrast, there's nothing lacking from Squarespace, the sponsor of this video. Squarespace has everything you need to sell anything on the internet. First, you create your website.