Most people are familiar with the banana as a seedless, soft, and easy-to-eat fruit, leading to a question about whether bananas even have seeds. The supermarket varieties, like the popular Cavendish, rarely contain anything that looks like a typical fruit seed, which causes confusion for those who know that most fruits develop from fertilized flowers. To understand the appearance of a banana seed, one must look beyond the grocery store and examine the fruit’s wild ancestors.
Seed Traces in Store-Bought Bananas
The tiny, dark specks found running down the center of a commercial banana are actually non-viable remnants of its reproductive past. These small, dark brown or black dots are the undeveloped ovules, which are the structures that would have matured into seeds in a wild plant. They are arranged in a faint ring along the inner core, marking the locations of the banana’s three carpels, or fruit sections. The banana plant still initiates the development of these ovules, but the biological processes that lead to a full seed are incomplete. The fruit itself, the part we eat, develops fully around these shriveled traces, which remain as a harmless anatomical feature of the seedless fruit.
The Characteristics of True Banana Seeds
The true seeds of wild or ancestral banana varieties, such as Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana, look nothing like the tiny specks in a Cavendish banana. These seeds are large, hard, and prominent, often measuring up to a half-inch (about 1 centimeter) in diameter. They are irregularly angular, not smooth, and possess a tough seed coat, giving them a pebble-like texture. True banana seeds range in color from hard black to dark reddish-brown when fully mature. In wild fruit, these numerous, dense seeds often fill the entire pulp, making the fruit difficult and undesirable to eat.
Why Most Bananas Are Seedless
The familiar seedless banana is a product of millennia of human selection and two specific genetic traits: parthenocarpy and triploidy. Parthenocarpy is the ability of a plant to produce fruit without the need for fertilization of the ovules. This trait means the banana can develop its sweet, fleshy tissue without the development of mature seeds, which is highly desirable for human consumption. The second factor is triploidy, a condition where the plant possesses three sets of chromosomes instead of the standard two. This extra set of genetic material interferes with the normal process of meiosis, which is necessary to produce functional pollen and egg cells, leading to sterility and the absence of fully formed seeds.
Because commercial banana varieties cannot produce viable seeds, they are propagated asexually, or vegetatively. Farmers use offshoots called “suckers” or “pups” that grow from the underground stem, or rhizome, of the parent plant. Separating and replanting these suckers creates a clone of the parent, allowing the desirable seedless trait to be passed on from one generation to the next.