Whoa, that’s crazy! I just learned the truth about corners

I consider myself a deeply curious person, but sometimes I am amazed at how many things I interact every day without giving a second thought. Last night I stood in my kitchen, which had bought both mature sweet corn ears and a few sweet little babies on the farmers’ market because I thought my children would get a kick for them. When I withdrew the bowl on the baby corn, I noticed that the silk looked much more like fine hair in which they were rooted directly from the cob, like antennas from the head of an insect – not from the affectionate but apparently loose silk threads on fermented ears.

What are maisside? I thought and asked myself at the same time: How have I ever asked about this in my whole life with apparent corn? And so I added facts No. 54.679.832 to my mental run. “Whoa, that’s crazy! “ List in addition to surprising answers to gemstones like “What Really happens when a caterpillar turns into a butterfly? ”

Here is an answer: ears of the corn are clusters of female flowers, and the silk are their styles and stigms (the slim columns, the pollen catch on the egg and transport). Ok, that alone is not an earth -shaky news. But here is an even cooler fact: there is a silk for each individual kernel on the COB. Isn’t that amazing? (And now all Iowa laughs at this New Yorker, who has just learned something that they have known all their lives.)

The way it works is that the monosecious corn plant is, which means that every cornstiel contains both floral texts: the male tassels at the tip of the stem and the female ears that grow underneath. When the male tassels of a corn plant release pollen, the pollen is worn by the wind (in contrast to many other flowers based on pollination on insects). The pollen can pollinate ears both on the same plant and in others nearby who happen to catch the floating pollen grains.

When a pollen grain ends up on a silk, it literally walks down the length of the silk into the corn shell until it reaches the egg cell of the silk, which is on the “female inflorescence” (since the ear is more precisely named). As soon as they have been fertilized, every egg cell and their surrounding tissue swell into a single maize. There is a really one-to-one correspondence between the silk and kernels, almost like cables on an old-fashioned telephone switching board that connect individual lines with calls from the outside world.

Just think about it for a moment – an ear made of corn is everything: a flower, a collection of eggs, these eggs that have once grown into fruit that are also technically seen.

I will never look at a corn silk again; My anger about her presence was replaced by awe.