Field of Science

Do bananas have seeds?

A curious reader has submitted a question?  So TPP will give this curious primate an answer. Yes, bananas have seeds because they are seed plants. Now you've all eaten bananas and you probably did not seeds; nothing to eat around as in a watermelon. All varieties of standard banana cultivars are sterile; the fruit develop and mature, but the seeds don't. If you look closely inside your banana you'll see that it consists of 3 units (carpels) and near the point where the 3 units meet, you can see the tiny undeveloped seeds. On several occasions TPP has found fertile bananas in markets in SE Asia. The bananas look about the same, and the flesh tastes about the same, but they are filled with seeds that are annoyingly large, too big to be easily swallowed, and too numerous to be easily spit out. Obviously cultivated bananas are propagated asexually, vegetatively. After flowering and fruiting, the main stalk of a banana stalk is cut off leaving one or two branch stalks remaining. 

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