> You'd think all kiwis would be related, sharing brown fuzz and being associated with New Zealand, but actually the kiwi fruit and kiwi bird diverged 1.4 billion years ago.
This got a real chuckle from me! I've hear the key to comedy is surprise, and I didn't expect that in the middle of a bunch of interesting but serious facts.
whyenot 178 days ago [-]
Cool! It’s a really nice visual representation. I’m not totally convinced by the scaling of the branch lengths, but it doesn’t really matter for this. By the way, there are some fruit that branch off before the divergence between monocots and eudicots and are in a group generally called Magnoliids. Years ago they were classified as dicots, but they made that group polyphyletic. Some examples are avocado, cherimoya, and soursop.
Are there fruits that diverged through domestication, other than obvious cases like apple varieties?
Citrus, which is well represented in your tree is a good example.
And are those people who call watermelons "berries" actually basing it on science? (No.)
Botanically, melons, cucumbers, and the fruit of many (not all!) species in the Cucurbitaceae are classified as a pepo, a type of berry.
I was learned that fruit has it seeds inside, vegetables on the outside, meaning that strawberry is actually a vegetable.
whyenot 178 days ago [-]
Vegetables don't have seeds on the outside, and strawberries don't have that anyways. Each "seed" on the outside of a strawberry is actually a fruit that contains a single seed. If you look carefully with a magnifying glass or something similar, you can often still see the female parts of the flower (pistil) sticking up from each "seed." The fleshy and sweet part of a strawberry originates as part of the flower called the receptacle. It sits below the ovaries of the flower. In strawberries, the receptacle is cone shaped, probably an adaptation to increase access by pollinators. After pollination, this part of the flower swells up and becomes the strawberry that you are familiar with :) The little ring of green leaves at the top of of a strawberry are the sepals of the flower it originated from.
thaumasiotes 178 days ago [-]
> Each "seed" on the outside of a strawberry is actually a fruit that contains a single seed.
This depends on the perspective you want to take. From an anatomical perspective, the fruit part of the strawberry is different from the fruit part of a grape.
From an economic perspective, they are the same; the sweet and fleshy material is the payment from the plant to the animal for doing the plant a service. The seed is something that the animal doesn't want but consumes anyway as part of the deal.
However, one misnomer remains true — a Strawberry isn't actually a 'berry'.
pvaldes 178 days ago [-]
Is an useless definition. Pickles, Pepper and Peas are vegetables
thaumasiotes 178 days ago [-]
Vegetable just means "plant".
biddendidden 177 days ago [-]
[flagged]
patrickhogan1 178 days ago [-]
Please explain - curious
“You'd think all kiwis would be related, sharing brown fuzz and being associated with New Zealand, but actually the kiwi fruit and kiwi bird diverged 1.4 billion years ago.”
DrSAR 178 days ago [-]
a decent stab at humour. I chuckled.
patrickhogan1 178 days ago [-]
Haha, same here! I ended up diving into a kiwi fruit rabbit hole. Apparently, the kiwi fruit was originally called the Chinese gooseberry but was rebranded by New Zealand fruit breeders as part of a marketing strategy. It’s funny looking at this picture:
Now that's cultural appropriation! Thousands of years of domestication and breeding by Chinese fruit growers, and then New Zealand takes all the credit!
thaumasiotes 178 days ago [-]
> Thousands of years of domestication and breeding by Chinese fruit growers, and then New Zealand takes all the credit!
The kiwi does seem to have been domesticated by the Chinese, but you wouldn't want to infer that from the name "Chinese gooseberry". They could be like the Norwegian rat (also from China) or the "Persian" peach, prunus persica (which is from China too).
Maybe you should just assume that everything comes from China.
tuatoru 178 days ago [-]
Ya go' us bang to righ's, guv. Ih's a fair cop.
biddendidden 177 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Jun8 178 days ago [-]
The rose branch brought to mind again this poem by Robert Frost which is one of my favorites:
The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple's a rose,
And the pear is, and so's
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose -
But were always a rose.
In one of her letters Jane Austen mentions that they had a game of coming up with powers that rhyme with rose, you may see Jane's, her sister's and others' efforts (rather mundane) efforts here: https://pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablt18.html#letter97
graemep 178 days ago [-]
Grapefruit is a hybrid of pomelo and and orange so the say is is shown as a sibling of pomelo does not seem right.
jamessb 178 days ago [-]
Yes, this gives a misleading view of the relationship between citrus fruits.
Is not so simple, there are TWO grapefruits. One is an hybrid, the other is one of the four fantastic ancient Citrus species, that are the grand-grand-grand-parents of (almost) every known fruit from that family. "Everything", from Uglyfruits to Blood Oranges to Key limes is an hybrid except a very few wild species
Affric 177 days ago [-]
> Wild species
Praise be to the finger lime
pvaldes 178 days ago [-]
Um, I see what are you saying, this part of the diagram with orange being older than pomelo is clearly wrong. Good point. Is good to remind that genetic analysis must be interpreted wisely together with other facts, or can easily mislead.
mjamesaustin 178 days ago [-]
In general this view doesn't do a good job of explaining citrus fruits. There are a huge variety of hybrids mostly deriving from combinations of the mandarin, pomelo, citron, and micrantha (lime).
Scarblac 178 days ago [-]
Where do grapes go? Surprised one of the fruits I eat most commonly isn't in the chart.
fifticon 177 days ago [-]
I was going to ask the same thing, but instead I upvote your question.
I searched to make sure it only hit grapefruit. I did however not read all the notes; possibly they indirectly hint at a reason to exclude grapes (but not something that matches the text g r a p e).
thadk 178 days ago [-]
These trees often gives good generic bearings for allergies and other aspects of life.
This got a real chuckle from me! I've hear the key to comedy is surprise, and I didn't expect that in the middle of a bunch of interesting but serious facts.
Are there fruits that diverged through domestication, other than obvious cases like apple varieties?
Citrus, which is well represented in your tree is a good example.
And are those people who call watermelons "berries" actually basing it on science? (No.)
Botanically, melons, cucumbers, and the fruit of many (not all!) species in the Cucurbitaceae are classified as a pepo, a type of berry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_botanical_terms#pe...
This depends on the perspective you want to take. From an anatomical perspective, the fruit part of the strawberry is different from the fruit part of a grape.
From an economic perspective, they are the same; the sweet and fleshy material is the payment from the plant to the animal for doing the plant a service. The seed is something that the animal doesn't want but consumes anyway as part of the deal.
However, one misnomer remains true — a Strawberry isn't actually a 'berry'.
“You'd think all kiwis would be related, sharing brown fuzz and being associated with New Zealand, but actually the kiwi fruit and kiwi bird diverged 1.4 billion years ago.”
https://i.etsystatic.com/9032484/r/il/79babb/1458733776/il_f...
The kiwi does seem to have been domesticated by the Chinese, but you wouldn't want to infer that from the name "Chinese gooseberry". They could be like the Norwegian rat (also from China) or the "Persian" peach, prunus persica (which is from China too).
Maybe you should just assume that everything comes from China.
This diagram (on the Wikipedia article for Citrus) gives more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hybrid_origins_of_Citrus....
Praise be to the finger lime
See also: the garden's evolutionary history: https://observablehq.com/@thadk/garden
and the make-your-own evolutionary history using pyodide and the python ETE3 library: https://observablehq.com/@thadk/life