Reproduction
Figs have an obligate mutualism with fig wasps, (Agaonidae); figs are pollinated only by fig wasps, and fig wasps can reproduce only in fig flowers. Generally, each fig species depends on a single species of wasp for pollination. The wasps are similarly dependent on their fig species to reproduce. F. pleurocarpa is pollinated by two species of fig wasp—Pleistodontes regalis and P. deuterus. This is one of the few cases where more than one species of fig wasp has been raised from the same syconium. The assumption that fig species are usually pollinated by just one species of fig wasp has been challenged by the discovery of cryptic species complexes among what was thought previously to be single species of fig wasps.
Read more about this topic: Ficus Pleurocarpa
Famous quotes containing the word reproduction:
“The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Although Samuel had a depraved imagination—perhaps even because of this—love, for him, was less a matter of the senses than of the intellect. It was, above all, admiration and appetite for beauty; he considered reproduction a flaw of love, and pregnancy a form of insanity. He wrote on one occasion: “Angels are hermaphrodite and sterile.””
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“An original is a creation
motivated by desire.
Any reproduction of an original
is motivated by necessity ...
It is marvelous that we are
the only species that creates
gratuitous forms.
To create is divine, to reproduce
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—Man Ray (1890–1976)