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A watermelon plant sprouts both male and female flowers, but its sterility renders its male flower impotent. To ensure the continuation of its seedless species, the female flower must be pollinated. This is primarily achieved by agents, such as a honey bee, which acts as a wing-man and carries pollen from neighboring diploids.
Watermelons are only known for two things: the sweet juice of their crushed-ice-textured flesh and seed spitting. However, since the 1990s, people seem to play the sport less and less; in fact, some watermelons don’t have any seeds now, so the game could be lost forever!
On the other hand, in the sweltering summer heat, not everyone enjoys their divine stream of cold juice being perpetually interrupted by tiny rocks…
A seedless fruit is an oxymoron. It is perplexing and biologically contradictory, because fruits are just mature flowers that protect seeds. It is the seed inside a fruit that ensures the survival of its plant’s species. A fruit without a seed would mean that the plant that bore it is sterile — it is one genetic code’s final heir. At the heart of our inquiry lies the question: how do we grow a plant when its fruits contain no seeds? The inventors therefore had two problems to solve: growing a plant that bears seedless fruits and somehow ensuring that it continues to procreate, despite its sterility. So, how did they resolve these issues?
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Cross Breeding
To nature, sterility is an atrocity – a heinous crime. Nature encourages the survival of its species (precisely, its genes) at all costs. Such a crime can only be committed by tinkering with a plant’s cellular structure either, naturally (very unfortunate) or artificially, through deliberate cross-breeding, for example.
A watermelon embedded with seeds possesses 22 chromosomes — thread-like entities that carry the genes. Such a species is called a diploid. However, the chromosomes can be doubled by treating the plant with the chemical colchicine. The new species, a tetraploid, now possesses 44 chromosomes. Now, when the tetraploid is pollinated by a diploid, or when the diploid’s male reproductive cell fuses with the tetraploid’s female reproductive cell, a seed possessing 33 chromosomes is formed, a triploid. This seed grows into a watermelon plant that bears seedless watermelons.
It is imperative to know that by “seedless”, we mean that the watermelon isn’t replete with the seeds that we normally refer to as seeds — the brown, minuscule pebbles — but rather, it possesses the white, translucent and softer ones that are less hated. These are immature seeds whose coatings haven’t completely developed. The first problem is therefore solved; we discovered how to create one, but how do we ensure that it procreates?
In a vegetation of seedless watermelon plants, only two-thirds are triploids, while the rest are diploids. A watermelon plant sprouts both male and female flowers, but its sterility renders its male flower impotent. To ensure the continuation of its seedless species, the female flower must be pollinated. The pollens are provided by the diploids planted around it. This is primarily achieved by agents, such as a honey bee, which acts as a wing-man and carries pollen from the neighboring diploids and drops them onto the triploid’s females. The flower matures and transmutes into a delightful fruit, except that it is seedless.
Seedless fruits aren’t necessarily grown by cross-breeding. Vines that bear seedless grapes are grown by cloning. They are descendants of the very first vine that bore seedless grapes. For more details, click here.
Also Read: How Are Seedless Grapes Grown?
The Costs
Of course, the convenience of eating a watermelon bereft of seeds does come at a cost. Its beauty seems to be starkly overshadowed by its blemishes. Seedless watermelons are warm-season crops; thus, for propitious germination, they must grow in day temperatures of 80 to 95ᵒF and night temperatures of 60 to 70ᵒF. The growth will not be optimum if these temperatures aren’t maintained; to ensure that, they are grown in greenhouses with facilities that come at very high costs.
Another disadvantage is the plant’s lack of variety. As there is no room for any variation, successive generations cannot evolve to resist an infection that killed an ancestor or thwarted its growth in some way. An infection that impedes one can impede the others just as easily.
Despite its limitations, seedless watermelons are grown widely. Vendors earn a fortune since the market is huge. In the few years following its invention, the fruit resembled its seeded cousin, but didn’t taste as sweet as one would expect. However, improved breeding techniques have instilled the uniquely sweet taste as well. Could it get any more convenient?
Also Read: How Does A Seed Grow Into A Tree?
How well do you understand the article above!
