Eli5 How does a banana, which doesn’t have any seeds, spread and make more bananas?
In: Biology
Random fact along those lines since all bananas are clones of each other they can all be killed by a single disease. The bananas we eat today are different than the bananas that were around in the 60s. Not by much but by enough that our current bananas didn’t die from a disease that cam through and wiped the old banana strain out. This is one of the big complaints against factory farming and mono culture crops.
Bananas have seeds. Though small. When a animal eats it, it defecates and spreads the seeds where that lands
Bananas do have seeds, it’s just that we’ve been breeding bananas to have smaller and smaller seeds over the years, so that the seeds are small enough that you barely notice them anymore.
They don’t. The bananas you eat are a seedless cultivar (=variation of a plant species) bred for food. Wild bananas [look like this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana#/media/File:Inside_a_wild-type_banana.jpg).
Like many plants, banana plants can reproduce through small pieces of themselves. If you take a new banana shoot off an existing plant, cut it off, and plant it separately, you’ll get a new independent banana tree identical to the original. Nearly all bananas trees grown today are clones or near-clones of a few closely-related trees. But they wouldn’t reproduce on their own, really; they need human intervention to do so.
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