Whoa, it’s crazy! I just learned the truth about corn bristles

I consider myself a deeply curious person, but I sometimes marvel at the number of things with whom I interact daily without thinking. Last night, I was standing in my kitchen shaking the two sweet mature ears of corn and cute little baby that I had bought at the farmer market because I thought my children were kicking. While I received the ball on the baby corn, I noticed that the bristles looked much more like fine hairs rooted and growing directly from the torchage, like the antennas of the head of an insect – clearly different from the sticky silk threads but apparently loose on fully cultivated ears.

What are corn bristles? I said to myself, while wondering simultaneously: How, in all my corn life, I never asked for this before? And it is therefore that I added the facts n ° 54 679 832 to my running mind “Whoa, it’s crazy! “” List, in addition to surprising answers to jewels such as ” Really When a caterpillar turns into a butterfly? “(This one always blows me!) All these songs make me a lot of fun during cocktails.

Here is an answer: corn ears are clusters of female flowers, and bristles are their styles and stigma (thin columns that catch and transport pollen to the egg). OK, this is not the only overwhelming news. But here is an even cooler fact: there is a silk for each nucleus on the cob. Isn’t that incredible? (And now, all of iowa laughs at this New York native who has just learned something that they have known all their lives.)

The way it operates is that the corn plant is monoe, which means that each corn rod contains the two sexes of flowers: the male acorns at the top of the rod and the female ears growing below. When the male acorns of a pollen of corn plant released pollen, pollen is transported by the wind (unlike many other flowers, which are based on insects for pollination). Pollen can pollinate the ears both on the same plant and others nearby that catch floating pollen grains.

When a pollen grain landed on a silk, it literally travels the length of the silk in the corn ball until it reaches this silk egg cell located on “female inflorescence” (because the ear is named more precisely). Once fertilized, each egg cell and its surrounding tissues swell to form a single core of corn. There is a correspondence truly one by one between bristles and grains, almost like wires on an old -fashioned telephone standard, each connecting individual lines to calls from the outside world.

It is enough to think about this for a moment – an ear of the corn is all the following: a flower, a collection of eggs, these eggs formerly transformed into fruits, which are also, technically, seeds.

I will never watch corn silk again; My discomfort with their presence was replaced by a fear.