Which animal pollinates bananas

Each cluster is covered by a thick, waxy hood that has a deep red interior and purple exterior. The first five to 15 rows of flowers are female.

As the shaft grows longer, sterile female and male flowers appear. A day after the flowers open, the male flowers fall off. Female flowers produce the bananas.

The first female flowers are rich in nectar and have ovaries in the shape of tiny bananas. In cultivated species of bananas the flowers develop fruit without pollination. Cultivated bananas are also seedless.

What were once seeds appear as brown specks in the flesh. Bats feeding on nectar pollinate species of wild bananas that have drooping or horizontal flowers. Male banana flowers have a slender style and stigma, and well-developed anthers, which in wild species usually contain pollen. In edible bananas, the amount of pollen is reduced or absent. Together, the anther and the filament form a stamen. A male banana flower typically has five stamens.

The style, stigma and male parts of the banana flower are enveloped within a tubular structure formed by fusion of five petal-like tepals, with a sixth tepal remaining free. The gynoecium is much smaller than in female flowers. Male flowers do not have ovules but they have nectaries. The quantity of nectar and its sugar concentration is lower than in female flowers. In wild banana species, the nectar attracts pollinators, mainly bats and birds.

Edible bananas do not need to be pollinated, but because their flowers still produce nectar they are visited by animals and insects. The male flowers are contained in the male bud , in which they are arranged in clusters called hands. Each hand is enfolded by a bract that lifts when the flowers have finished developing. Male flowers usually fall to the ground a short time after flowering.

In some wild species, the basal fruit-forming flowers have a functional gynoecium and androecium, and can self-fertilise before bract opening if the stigma and anthers are aligned. These flowers are called hermaphrodite or perfect. The term hemaphrodite has to be used to describe basal flowers in Musa acuminata ssp. The ability to self-fertilize is significant because it reduces hybridization and as such contribute to genetic isolation. In some edible bananas, there may be flowers at the point of transition from the basal female to the distal male portion of the inflorescence that do not produce fruit and have a small ovary, although it is larger than in male flowers.

These flowers may retain some features of fruit-forming flowers, such as remaining attached to the peduncle. Such flowers are called neuter or intermediate. They are also described in some wild species, where they can be neuter or functionally male.

The data in the chart are from 39 Musa species or subspecies. In wild species of banana , the flowers provide the structure for sexual reproduction, which occurs when pollen produced by the anther of a male flower fertilises the ovule in a female flower to produce a viable embryo. First, pollen needs to be transferred to the stigma. Since the female flowers open before the male flowers on the same inflorescence, more than one inflorescence, and a pollinator to collect and deliver the pollen, are essential.

The tube emerging from a germinated pollen grain responds to chemical signals that guide it down the canal in the centre of the style to reach one of the three locules where ovules are located. Further guidance is needed to get a pollen tube to an available ovule to form a viable embryo. The fertilised ovule containing the viable embryo develops into a seed.

This in turn stimulates pulp development around the seeds in the ovary, resulting in a seed-bearing banana fruit. In a wild species a fruit might contain up to seeds. The nature of the banana inflorescence is that female flowers are separated in space and time from male flowers.

In this case, pollinators are essential for seed production. Since the tepals are not colourful and nectar is abundant, the main pollinators are bats and birds. In edible bananas, sexual reproduction is rarely successful, with very few if any seeds produced as a consequence of pollination. This failure is multifaceted, due to a greater or lesser extent to a lack of viable pollen, disruption of the pollen pathway through the gynoecium in the female flower and a lack of viable ovules.

Instead, the fruit of edible bananas develop through vegetative parthenocarpy, with the pulp developing autonomously from tissues on the ovary wall of the female flower without the need for pollination. Main page. Pages in English. This website uses cookies to enhance your user experience.

Many people are unaware that over plant species rely on bats to pollinate their flowers , including species of mango, banana, durian, guava and agave used to make tequila. So, next time you drink some tequila or eat a mango, say thanks to the bats! The pollination of plants by bats is called chiropterophily. Plants pollinated by bats often have pale nocturnal flowers in contrast, bees are mostly attracted to bright, daytime flowers.

These flowers are often large and bell shaped, and some bats have evolved specifically to reach the nectar at the bottom of them. The tube-lipped nectar bat of Ecuador and the banana bat that lives only on the Pacific coast of Mexico both have extraordinarily long tongues for this exact reason. While these plants rely on bats to pollinate their flowers, bats also rely on the fruit and flowers of these plants to survive.

Disturbing this intricate system can have severe consequences. For example, in Mexico, the lesser long-nosed bat that is partly responsible for the pollination of agave plants, used to make mescal and tequila. However, in the majority of tequila production, farmers harvest the plant before it puts out its flowers, meaning it has to reproduce through cloning.