eli5: Why do certain fruits keep growing, even though we have genetically modified many fruits not to have seeds?
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Most seedless plants are grown from cuttings, which makes the plants all genetic clones of each other.
Potatoes for example have flowers and seeds, but if you plant the seeds the resulting plant won’t make potatoes you recognize. Specific Potato varieties are so heavily modified that they can only be grown from cuttings.
While this is good from a volume and consistency perspective in farming, this can actually pose some serious problems.
Supermarket Bananas for example are all the same cloned plant. The specific variety we know and love is called the Cavendish but because all the trees are clones they are vulnerable to a specific fungus that is killing them all off.
Banana plantations are also full of trees that are all the same age because they were planted at the same time and large plantations are starting to either lose all their trees due to age, or they are being killed off or forcibly burned down due to the fungus.
Within a decade or two the bananas we know will be functionally extinct. The good news is we’ll just start eating a different variety, and this has actually happened before. The Gros Michel banana that was widely eaten in the late 19th and early 20th century went extinct for the exact same reason.
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