Comment on After 4 years my banana tree decided it was time to fruit!

BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Bananas are a vegetable

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• TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Then explain to me what an tree is. Is it the presence or absence of hemi-celluose? Lignin? Welwitschia has both. Is it a tree?

  Does it have to evolve from another tree? Can you make a group of trees that isn’t paraphyletic?

  “trees” (and “herbs”) aren’t natural clades but rather form‑based, morphological grades, and only really colloquially so. In cladistic terms they’re polyphyletic or at best paraphyletic. Its a term that pulls together organisms by shared structure (woodiness, height, lack of wood) rather than by a single common ancestor and all its descendants.

  Its fine to call it a tree. Its what people who grow bananas call them, which is usually a better source for a use-term.

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  • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Sure, I actually have a degree in botanical sciences, majoring in Olericulture -which is the study of soft-skinned herbivorous plants for food production. So, I can speak pretty confidently on it. Strictly, a tree is a large, woody, perennial plant that grows slowly over time and produces offspring in the form of angiosperms e.g. apple tree, or gymnosperms e.g. a spruce tree -on a yearly-ish basis. The banana plants root is a rhizome, it’s a speacialised underground stem that grows sectionally, forming nodes. If you’ve ever encountered runner varieties of bamboo, you’ll know what that means. They don’t penetrate nearly as deeply into the soil, they spread rapidly and herbivorous plants are much easier to clone than woody trees.

    Because it is a herb and not a tree, Banana plants grow very very fast and they die after they give fruit and that is a real key point in the difference. There are no annual trees, because trees grow slowly and very hardily. Trees are perennial, meaning their above ground structure will remain alive throughout the seasons and after fruiting. If you see a crop of banana plants. They’re 9 months old at fully grown. Their stems are formed by sections of leaves that grow over each other, kinda like certain varieties of bamboo, if you look at how they grow you’ll see that in the stem. After the fruiting they die. Banana plants grow fast, produce offspring and they die back to the rhizome. Your commercially grown banana plant will live roughly a year after it fruits, doesn’t matter if it was 10ft tall, it will die back to the rhizome. Much in the same way ferns will. Trees don’t do that. There are tress alive today that are millions of years old. There is no herb that is millions of years old. It’s a completely ecological niche. Herbs are soft skinned, grow rapidly, produce offspring, wither and die. Trees are woody, produce bark to protect themselves and live for generations, repeatedly producing offspring.

    “trees” (and “herbs”) aren’t natural clades but rather form‑based, morphological grades, and only really colloquially so. In cladistic terms they’re polyphyletic or at best paraphyletic. Its a term that pulls together organisms by shared structure (woodiness, height, lack of wood) rather than by a single common ancestor and all its descendants. But it doesn’t need to meet all of those terms to fall into the group.

    You don’t need to specify “natural clade” a clade is a grouping of a common ancestor and all of its descendants. There is no unnatural clade. It also doesn’t mean anything in terms of classifying trees. We created that classification. That’s why things don’t fit neatly into everything 100% of the time. But you can do it with mammals too and sea creatures and basically any category of living thing. Trees don’t need to have a singular common ancestor because convergent evolution means they can develop enough shared traits which make them a discreet group of organisms. As opposed to the banana plant which lacks the morphological characteristics of a tree.

    You can’t grow them like an “herb”, whatever tf that is.

    That is a very dumb statement. There’s lots of information you can get online bro and it’s very easy to sound like you know what you’re talking about. If you’re If you want someone educated in the field to take your opinion seriously, don’t use scientific terms like “morphology” and “polyphyletic” and then demonstrate that you don’t know what an herbivorous plant is. The first thing you learn in undergrad, after the structure of flowering plants and types of meristemic tissue, is herbivorous plants.

    Other things real quick, herbivorous plants have way more water and a much bigger demand for it as well. That’s Bananas are grown at the tropics and in greenhouses. They need the humidity to be healthy and produce fruit. You can buy a banana plant and keep it in your house for years with no fruit, because it’s unlikely to meet the conditions necessary.

    If you need more practical differentiation, that you can experience yourself. Get a little mini chain saw and cut through a limb on a tree, after that, rev up the saw and try to cut through the bottom of a fully grown Banana. Lastly, I get what you’re saying. The argument is there’s no such thing as a tree like there’s no such thing as a fish. But the differentiation is important in terms of botany, because yeah the existence of woodies is due to convergent evolution. But, if you’re a horticulturalist the tools and practices for tree care is a totally different discipline to growing and producing food through Olericulture. Which is what bannana cultivation would fall under.

    Sources: Bsc Botanical Science and Practices, 2 years as director of a hydroponics facility, 1 year as a climbing arborist’s assistant.

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    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Bro you should e-mail your botany 101 instructor and complain, because you didn’t get the education you paid for.

      And you want to post qualifications as dick measuring? Bro I’ve also got a BSc in Botany (and not an adjacent or tangential field. an actual “Botany” degree from one of the very very few schools that still offer one). An MSc in Plant Science, and beyond that a PhD in a related field.

      I taught undergraduate botany. Both the lecture and the lab section. I’ve worked in labs specifically looking at the early evolution of woody plants.

      You’ll die on this hill: There isn’t a technical definition of the word “tree”.

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    • Lumisal@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      So,uh, what does it mean if you have a banana plant that has given bananas multiple times and not died?..

      Because growing up, we had one that gave bananas at least 5 or 6 times before it stopped for a couple years before giving one last bunch, but the plant didn’t die and just stayed there for years more after that, giving new leaves every now and then which we used for tamales.

      The bananas it gave were very fat but still decently long, if that helps. It “died” many years later when a strong hurricane caused a woody tree limb near it to break and rip it in half. But from the trunk it started sprouting a new one, except then ants made an anthill in it and I think they finally killed it.

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      • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Totally, I can explain that. There can be a couple of things going on. You can start with environment, where you are. I had a couple banana plants for about 15 years in Ireland. Red banana and dwarf banana, they’re grown for their flowers but they did produce fruit and then continue to live. They were indoors, so they never overwintered. They also were not in a subtropic climate, so when they did fruit it was only one stem and not the whole plant. When I’m talking about cultivation of Bananas, it’s the Cavendish banana. Which is your chiquita banana, del monte cultivar. That are grown and maintained in the proper climate, with yearly crop cycles outdoors and they’re all sexually sterile triploids. Bananas you get from a nursery are not the same and so different varieties in sub-optimal climates will behave differently. Fruit production is driven by ethylene, it’s the phyto-hormone that produces female flowers seeds. Like Cannabis, Bananas are a heavy nitrogen feeder.

        To get optimal growth you want to keep your Ph floating between 5.5 and 6.5 because that is the range where you get the most nitrogen absorbed whilst still getting required levels of Phosphorus and Potassium. Demand for Phosphorus and Potassium goes up during flowering because you need them for ethylene production. So, if you have insufficient levels of Phosphorus and Potassium, you’ll get in a situation where it could be pollinated and even start to fruit, but be unable to complete the process. So it doesn’t all die back. People think of flowering/fruiting as set parts of a plant’s lifecycle, but biology (especially when you’re caring for a plant in a man made environment) is messier than that. If you grow any photoperiod plant indoors, under LED light, you can demonstrate this really easy. It’s possible to reverse it and go back into vegetative growth. Used to be a popular method with amateur cannabis farmers.

        They’d swap a plant into flowering by changing the light cycle, which causes the plant to start producing higher levels of ethylene and stretch. It’s like a big shot of growth hormone, plants can double in size in a matter of two weeks sometimes. Then they’d swap it back to an 18/6 light schedule and you get really weird gnarled growth at first and then it will start to produce normal fan leaves again. Then after a few weeks, they’d flip it to flower and it would get that same big boost to vegetative growth again. Which was handy when you’re growing one plant to yourself and your mates indoors. Totally impractical for commercial cultivation. If your banana wasn’t producing flowers those years it was stalled, it wasn’t gonna produce fruit. Equally conditions (lets say low P-K levels) only allow for part of the plant to produce flowers. Only the that part of the plant will have the potential to produce fruit.

        I don’t know, specifically, the conditions that caused your plant to behave like that. But, it’s almost 100% going to be some factor of environment. Light, humidity, nutrient content of the medium. Say your humidity is really low, your banana leaf is still going to grow, but the rate at which gas exchange will occur will be totally different. So, they won’t absorb the necessary Co2, which they need for for cellular respiration through creating ATP. Like most plants, banana and Cannabis are type C3 plants. So they only bind Co2 when the light is on them. So, if you have reduced levels of light, not through yearly seasonal changes, but like shade. They will grow much much slower, because PAR is logarithmic, so even a little bit of crowding out, or shading means massively reduced levels of light.

        If I was a betting man, I’d say just insufficient/ nutrients/light to complete the fruiting cycle. Also, when I say they die after fruiting, they die back to their root, essentially. Which throughout the growth cycle is proliferating new rhizomes. That will grow out of the same area that the primary plant was. They don’t “die” and that’s it it’s nothing. They reproduce through fruit and through the kind of natural cloning of the proliferation of rhizomes. Not specifically the Cavendish banana because it’s been engineered to produce no seeds. Which is a good place to leave this off with a very fun fact. The Cavendish Banana that’s cultivated for sale to international markets, along with seedless watermelon, seedless grapes etc. are as I mentioned before, what we call Triploids and I’ll end it here.

        Ploidy in plants is comparable to chromosomes in people. Normally the banana would be a Diploid. In Olericulture specifically, we normally grow triploids, because they are sexually sterile. Crocus extract (also a gout medication in humans) is a tubule inhibitor. Normally, when meiosis occurs and the cell divides to form two gametes you get one cell with half the DNA and the other with the other half. After exposure to Crocus extract, you get 1 gamete that has 100% of the necessary DNA and an empty cell that can’t do anything. The offspring of that plant after fertilisation, will be a quadriploid. Just means the DNA of 2 plants contained in one. You cross that with an unaltered diploid plant and the resulting offspring will be a triploid. Because triploids are incapable of producing offspring. Even when they meet pollen, because having 1 and 1/2 times the amount of DNA in the plant means that there’s always an unpaired strand of DNA, so the plant never gets the signal to start incubating seeds. The bananas produced by triploids are way bigger and highly prolific as well, just by the nature of their genetics.

        Hope that answers your question, sorry about all the extraneous stuff, got me thinking about University for the first time in a decade.

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      • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Disclaimer: I’m a microbiologist, not a botanist, although I took a bunch of botany and mycology courses to fill my elective requirements and for… recreational reasons.

        There are a few cultivars, like double mahoi, that’ll produce fruit twice before dying back, but 5-6 is unusual.

        The usual cycle is a single “trunk” (pseudostem) will grow, flower, fruit, then die. As it grows, it’ll produce daughter plants which appear as additional, initially smaller trunks which follow the same cycle, just offset in time from the parent plant.

        Did your plant have multiple trunks? If so, it was actually multiple plants. If not, you possibly had a plant with a novel mutation that could have been very lucrative.

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  • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s a big stick-y thing with leafs

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    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      But that’s not important right now.

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    • Rozauhtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Then is bamboo a tree?

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      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Since there isn’t a technical or widely accepted scientific definition of the word “tree”, its perfectly fine to call bamboo a tree.

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      • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Nope, Bamboo is a grass :)

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    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      bingo

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      • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Well at least we know where you get your sources from. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree

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  • Almonds@mander.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s considered an herb because the vegetation dies back after fruiting, instead of remaining persistent. If you really want to get technical it’s a forb, which is an herb that isn’t grass-like. But yeah, it’s literally just a description of its growth habit. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone casually calling a Wisteria a “liana” , for example, because it’s not really a helpful term outside of certain botanical contexts

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    • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s not “considered a herb” it is a herbivorous plant. That dudes a dope.

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    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      My broader point was to dismiss the ungrounded pedantry of insisting that a Banana tree is an “herb” rather than a tree.

      Likewise “forb” as a term isn’t any more meaningful than “herb” or “tree”, and the broader point that I’m making is that if you are going to engage in pedantry, then you need to actually get it fully and technically correct, which you can’t do with words like “herb” or “tree” or “forb” because they aren’t technical words with scientific (read: testable) definitions.

      The argument about about which term is more correct isn’t meaningful, because neither are. There isn’t a technically agreed upon definition for what is an “herb” and what is a “tree” because they aren’t technical terms. And in those situations, we should just use the term most useful to the “thing” , which in this case, is “tree”.

      My issue isn’t with calling a banana an herb or a tree. My issue is the pedantry around correcting someones language towards a no-more-correct, and perhaps even less correct term. If you are going to correct someone, you need to actually be correct. And its no more correct to call a banana a tree than it is an herb. I grow and sell both bananas, and yes, banana trees (also known as pups or keiki). That’s what the people who grow and farm them call them.

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      • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You’re a moron

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      • Almonds@mander.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I was agreeing with you that it’s silly to correct someone calling it a tree outside of specific contexts, just like arguing a tomato isn’t a vegetable.

        For what it’s worth, I have had to learn the growth habits of plants in ecology classes for a degree that I am currently earning. I have plant identification books that use those terms, because they do have a technical use.

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      • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You seem to be making two points here:

        1. That people colloquially call it a tree, so don’t “correct” that we know what they are talking about.

        That seems fair enough.

        But then you seem to say that:

        2. There is no definition of what a tree or herb is so you can’t separate the two. The term is used to describe non woody growth that dies back. How can you say the word herbaceous is not a testable definition?

        I don’t think it is pedantic at all. I have a banana patch, and I certainly consider them bushes instead of trees. I think people are interested in finding out the trivia that a banana tree is not a tree, but an herb.

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