how seedless fruits keep being grown? Like if you have a seedless clementine, or grape, what is used to plant the next generation of that fruit?
In: Biology
There are two ways to get seedless fruits. For clementines, grapes, and other things that grow on long-lived trees or vines, the plants are propagated by cuttings. This is true even for the ordinary varieties of most of these plants. All grapes of a particular variety are descended from one original grape plant, which had cuttings taken and rooted to form new grape plants, and then cuttings of those taken to form new plants, and so on. The same goes for most fruit tree varieties.
So if you find a mutant grape without seeds, you just cut off a shoot, plant it in the ground (or more likely graft it to some rootstock but that’s not really important for this discussion) and grow more seedless grapes.
There are exceptions though, for single-season plants like watermelons, seedless plants are usually produced through hybridization. It’s similar to how horses + donkeys produce sterile mules…people figured out that if you hybridize certain varieties of watermelon with certain other varieties of watermelon (in this case diploid with tetraploid varieties) you get sterile offspring. The seeds of this hybridization grow into plants which can’t make developed seeds themselves.
EDIT: forgot one method. Some seedless fruits are grown by simply preventing the flower from being pollinated. Not all plants will do this, but some will still form fruit even if there’s no fertile seed inside. Pineapples for example will grow seeds if pollinated, but can’t usually pollinate others of the same variety. So farmers grow a bunch of the same variety and avoid getting seeds in the fruit (although you occasionally still find one). Pineapples are pollinated by hummingbirds and some bats, so in Hawaii they banned the import of hummingbirds to avoid having their pineapples pollinated.
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