Why do so many fruits have seedless varieties but the apple and cherry do not?
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In grapes, mandarins and watermelons there’s not much you can eat from the fruit where you’re sure to not get any seeds. So getting rid of the seeds is a big improvement.
With apples, most of the fruit is never going to have a seed and you can just munch carefree until you get to the core. Same with other types of melons that have their seeds all in the middle. It’s so easy to scoop them out that developing seedless varieties isn’t worth it.
Developing new apple varieties is also a slow process. It takes up to 8 years for an apple tree to bear first fruit so you can find out if whatever you’ve created tastes any good.
There are also a variety of ways that seedless fruits are created. With grapes they manipulate the plant into making a fruit without seeds but those tend to lack the hormone needed to make the fruit grow to its normal size. Applied to apples you might get seedless apples but only of the size of apricots or so. And again, you have to wait up to 8 years to find out.
With melons they have two fields of different “parent” melons that when you put the pollen of one type on the flowers of the other the resulting fruit can’t make seeds. Which is a tricky but doable for large fruits like watermelons. Doing that for a whole apple tree is much more effort (if that’s the road that would need to be taken).
TLDR: It’s a LOT of work for an uncertain amount of benefit.
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