The Garrulous Jay – Fig & Wasp

This year we are enjoying a glut of figs. This isn’t always the case as in some years the fig tree in our garden offers us nothing: it still bears fruit, but they never ripen and remain as hard as nuts until they shrivel in the autumn.

The fig tree is fussy about the weather conditions it needs for its fruit to ripen, and too little warmth or sunshine will lead to disappointment.

The good news for us, though, is that we have an edible fig tree rather than a wild fig, as the former are able to produce fruit without pollination.

The way in which wild figs are pollinated is one of nature’s many incredible stories.

It starts with the fruit themselves, which are not what they might at first appear to be. A fig fruit is in fact an inverted cluster of flowers. Imagine a bunch of flowers where all the petals curled back on themselves, fused together and encased their seeds inside that case, leaving just a small hole at the top. That is effectively what the fruit is.

But what is remarkable is how this facilitates the pollination of wild figs. For each species of fig tree this relies entirely upon one or two specific species of wasp that have evolved alongside the tree to carry out this task.

The female wasps enter the fig’s enclosed flowers through that small hole in the fruit, carrying pollen from another fig.

They then lay their eggs inside the fruit, where they eventually develop, hatch and mate, before the males die and the females emerge to repeat the cycle.

Without the specific type of fig tree preferred by each species of wasp, the wasps would not be able to reproduce. Without the specific type of wasp to which each species of fig is adapted, the fig tree would not produce viable seeds and neither would it be able to reproduce.

This process of co-evolution is estimated to have been taking place since the late Cretaceous period, 75 to 90 million years ago: over 70 million years before the first members of the genus Homo appeared on earth.

Readers may be wondering what this has to do with finance, tax or macroeconomics… The answer is not a lot, but in the week the NIESR predicted the government would face a £41.2 billion shortfall against its fiscal ‘stability rule’, I didn’t think the world needed another piece from me on the Chancellor’s deepening challenges.

I also think the tale of the fig and wasp provides perspective to our concerns and preoccupations about the environment, and it should also make us feel humble before nature.

When we talk about the damage we are doing to ‘the environment’, what we actually mean is our environment. It is the damage we are doing to our own chances of survival with which we are quite understandably concerning ourselves.

In the long-run, nature will be just fine, and we should strive to work with it rather than against it to ensure our own continued success as a species.