Why does a banana-tree make banana's? There are no seeds in a banana. Where are the seeds?

Answer 1

The small black thing in the center is a vestigial seed, but is not a seed. Bananas do not reproduce sexually with any frequency. They are a triploid plant with three of each chromosome instead of the normal two. They also do not reproduce in the wild by losing limbs, but instead form new side-shoots, called suckers, at the base of the plant that will grow into full size individual plants with a root ball called a rhizome. A banana plant must be cut down at the base after it has produced fruit if it is expected to fruit again. The banana itself is the female part of the flower (ovaries), and the red bulbous flower-like part on the end of the stalk is the male part of the plant. The banana plant is not a result of hybridization.

About one seed is found in every 300 bananas in hand-pollinated bananas of various varieties. By moving pollen by hand from male parts of bananas to other plants they are able to cross-pollinate and occasionally produce a seed. Commercialy propogated bananas will not reproduce this way. Serious efforts are being made by botanists to produced new varieties of bananas because of a serious threat to the major commerical variety by a fungus.

The lack of genetic diversity in bananas poses a major threat to commercial growers of bananas. The Gros Michele was once the primary banana grown for market and was wiped out by a fungus called Panama disease. It was replaced by the Cavendish, which is slightly smaller than the Gros Michele. Cavendish was chosen for its resistance to the fungus, but a new strain of the fungus appeared in 1992 that has wiped out major plantations in southeast Asia.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/5a4d4c3ee4d05010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd/3.html

There are at least 300 varieties of bananas, and the major variety that is threatened by the new fungus is the commonly grown Cavendish. However, many other bananas are resistant to the fungus, but the problem for commercial growers is that they do not taste the same, or handle the same as the Cavendish and the Gros Michele before it. There was actually fear that the Cavendish would not be accepted because it was so much different from the Gros Michele, but now I doubt many people remember the older variety.

There is also a serious effort to sequence the genome of the banana, both because the banana has the exact same genetic make-up from plant to plant (in most cases) and in hopes that it will lead to a genetically engineered solution to the fungus.
http://www.tarweed.com/pgr/PGR99-062.html

http://www.crfg.org/pubs/ff/banana.html

Answer 2

1. The Banana tree, or in that matter most other trees, have genes to produce Fruits that are similar to the ones present in the mother plant. So the Banana tree produces the Banana fruit & not mango or orange or anything else.
2.The Banana fruit which u are talking about is a Hybrid. Nowadays we mostly get the seedless hybrid fruits rather than the wild type fruits which originally had seeds because the seedless fruits are produced in farms on a large-scale.So u will easily get seedless Bananas or seedless grapes or even seedless watermellons but it will be harder to find bananas, grapes & watermellons having seeds.

Answer 3

There are seeds, aren't there? Those little black things in the middle of the banana. I had a banana not that long ago, that had like mega seeds in the middle...

Answer 4

The seeds are the tiny black dots in the center of the banana. They are not viable. Bananas reproduce by, in essence, cloning themselves by having cuttings produce roots. In the wild state, they reproduce when a branch breaks off, and manages to put out roots.

Answer 5

Bananas propagate from a cutting. i.e. a section cut from a trunk of the plant. Thus, it can only spread by intervention. You can buy a bannana tree section in the garden stores and in Houston it will astound you in one summer -- bigger than a garage.

I've read interesting literature about there must have been a huge "adam" plant in the beginning. But how did it spread?

Answer 6

You must never have seen a ripe banana. They most certainly DO have seeds. They're really tiny, but they're there.

Answer 7

in the bananas, Einstein

Answer 8

there are little black seeds in the banana....duh

Answer 9

there are tiny black seeds inside the middle of the bannana. that is what grows. duur.