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#banana#bananas#more#tree#species#flowers#spider#https#don#climate
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Discussion (115 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The History of the Banana
https://youtu.be/YVVD1cYelUE?is=ADLXFR_-mIMdDfom
Here gets into ancient innovations that allowed bananas to be grown outside of their native habitat in Papua New Guinea.
If you haven't seen his content, and you get sucked in, then settle in without distractions - this is the opposite end of spectrum of TikTok, etc. Also, don't watch his "History of Sugar" documentary if you are feeling depressed. Instead watch the "History of Curry".
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Asianometry
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OsiD_s00RQ
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Alexander-the-ok
[1] https://www.youtube.com/technologyconnections
Also, most of these crops were specifically domesticated in the Andes. If you go to the Andes today you can still find traditional potato farmers who take care of hundreds of varieties of potatoes of all different shapes and colors. Some are ornamental, some are edible raw, some are only used in soup, some are even used medicinally
Maybe surprising is that there are no native species of banana to "the New World" despite there being about 100 species and thousands of named cultivars.
Pacific island cultures are a bit unique in their relationship to the New World though. Chickens which come from SE Asian jungles have been in South America since at least 1300 AD. And sweet potatoes were grown in Polynesia around 1000 AD.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...
> He said: "It's basically like having a mouth full of ball bearings with half a teaspoon of banana on them."
Maybe we can iterate on the texture some more here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inside_a_wild-type_banana...
I don't think so. There are a ton of varieties of banana that are grown from seed. Humans have cultivated them and selectively bred them from seed for thousands of years, just like every other plant. The seedless bananas that dominate western grocery stores are 1 variety, Cavendish, that have been endlessly cloned from cuttings. They weren't the first seedless variety commercially available, they were preceded by Gros Michel. But either way, travel to southeast Asia and you'll find a lot more varieties on sale.
But this is wild. I am only in my 40s but I've seen the climate change significantly and it having a major impact on flora and fauna.
When I was a kid, English wine was a joke and now it's winning prizes because we have the same climate French vineyards did when I was a child. The idea of growing olives in the UK was laughable, but now in the South East of England it's starting to look commercially viable. Only 10 years ago I remember days with highs over 30C being rare, but we just had two weeks of them, accompanied by tropical nights (not dropping below 20C), for the first time I remember.
And now... bananas. Which is, pun intended, utterly bananas.
It feels too late to stop the worst of the damage, but the idea of this accelerating and getting worse is just astonishing to me, that within my lifetime I'd witness such a huge swing in climatology.
I live in Hungary and they seem to be relatively widespread, if not as much as in southern Europe.
Alternatively, you could graft the branch of a pawpaw that flowers earlier to try and get the male and female flowers maturing at the same time. You might also be able to just buy some pollen. It's actually quite easy to collect. You can use a brush to sprinkle it on a female flower
How does this work in practice? Do other trees from the same species produce male flowers first, and then female? Logically, if all trees produce female flowers in spring and male flowers in the summer then the species can only survive if the seeds can remain viable unfertilized for months (which is probably not that exceptional for plants, I wouldn't know). But if the female seeds are still viable by the time the plant sprouts its male flowers, exactly how does this prevent self-pollination?
There is a registered case of a Phoneutria bite in UK at least, and the chef was sent directly to an hospital. To be fair, they dislike the cold so the spider had its reasons to be upset when he opened the fridge to grab a banana.
The spider is easily identified because it has four identical small frontal eyes arranged as a perfect square. Is big, bold and it warns before to attack [1] (most tarantulas are shy). And it jumps, of course. Can hide, once in a blue moon, in exported South American banana bunches (European breed bananas are spider free).
[1] If it raise the legs showing the yellow and black rings beneath is a clear warning saying "get lost right now, of I will land on your face"
A chef should know better than to keep bananas in a fridge!
BTW, the four frontal eyes in a box is not considered a good taxonomic character for IDing them, as spiders in other related genera also have this. They do have a warning posture, but not a "dance" that I am aware of. Also, they are terrestrial and hunt on the forest floor. The stories of them "jumping" are largely exaggerated.
Is a good taxonomic character if you are in Europe, as no European spider, big or small, has this eyes.
Also this is a fast way to discard other tropical spiders that could also appear on orders of imported fresh fruit and have a fearsome look but are harmless.
Tarantulas have small eyes arranged like a bowtie. Huntsmans have four eyes in a line. If you are bitten by a spider that is hairy, bigger than 10cm, and does have eyes arranged like those, is just a pinch, painful but safer than a mosquito bite. Just wash it with soap. Same if the eyes are arranged in a square but two are much bigger than the other two. Safe.
Otherwise.
If you are bitten by a cream hairy spider that has only "3 eyes", one central and two laterals (really 6 in 3 pairs) is a Sicariidae, go to a doctor.
If it has four eyes of the same size arranged in a square be cautious. If it has a middle groove in the rear part of the torax is a Ctenidae, so may be dangerous. As Phoneutria is the most common Ctenidae found in banana bunches, and as we can't discard still that every other genus on the family aren't poisonous, play safe and go to an hospital. If is a harmless related species only they can identify it, and if not you are in the correct place. They can evaluate if is a dry bite and can stabilize you and provide treatment if is not.
The other spiders that are really concerning, the Australian Atrax and Mouse spiders and the black widows are much smaller, 1-5cm, not really hairy and glossy black with red or white marks. They are mostly terrestrial.
If you have not crushed yet the spider, you may need to take a good photo from some distance. Is easier if you trap it before on a glass jar, as long as you can do it safely. If in doubt assure to bring the dead spider with you, so the doctor can see it under a microscope.
They put their four front legs together, two by two, and sort of point at you.
I was told that they are aggressive because they are well fed because they feed on the sap from the bananas whereas most spiders are usually hungry.
Also, do you think that it may have something to do with being cities with stone and steel that absorbs and radiates heat, and that cities are no longer as filled with trees due to urbanization and immigration filling them with people?
For context, London, Rome, and Paris have respectively gone from 2.6M, 175K, 1.05M populations to 14.5M, 4.3M, and 12.4M; so basically a 6–25x population size in ~125 years. You don’t think that may have something to do with it?
More context 10 million people produce about 1-1.5 gigawatts of continuous heat energy alone. That’s energy that would also be absorbed into stone structures of European cities even if to an unapparent degree, especially in the summers.
There are two sources of corruption.
The first is the urban heat island effect. Many weather stations are corrupted because although they were once in fields or other natural sites, over time cities expanded to meet the needs of the growing population and ended up building around the stations. This distorts readings by pushing up the min on the min/max thermometers, as tarmac absorbs heat during the day and re-radiates it at night. If you compute the average temperature for a day by just taking the midpoint between the min and max this makes it appear that the site is warming even if the max doesn't change i.e. there is no actual climate warming.
The second is that a large number of weather stations sit next to runways. It's intentional: pilots need to know runway temperature for takeoff calculations. But climatologists obviously shouldn't use them because not only are they next to tarmac, they're also being blasted with jet exhaust. So as population increases due to immigration (as western countries have below replacement fertility), jet travel goes up and this causes more traffic which warms the air at these weather stations.
In some countries this is a serious problem. For example, the UK is very built up with unusually high population density. The World Meteorological Organization has a classification system for weather stations in which class 1 is the best (lowest uncertainty) and class 4/5 are the worst (uncertainty of 2/5 degrees respectively, which is higher than the 1.5 degrees of warming claimed to have happened since 1850). Unfortunately nearly 90% of all British weather stations are class 4 or class 5, but the Met Office still use them to make claims about record breaking temperatures.
Climatologists have techniques they say correct for these problems, but the algorithms don't actually work. US GHCN uses something called homogenization, a kind of interpolation which spreads warmth from cities and runways into colder rural areas, creating an appearance of global warming across the entire dataset that's not there in the thermometer readings from uncorrupted sites.
According to Gemini, lots of untrue things are true.
More useful to look at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/World_Ha... and see if that makes more sense, although seemingly it's changing a bit and that graphic is quite old by now (2012). A plant's survival depends on more than just its hardiness and what zone it's in of course, but it's a useful starting point.
And according to science Fribourg offers more growing degree days
https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/45015~56049/Comparison-of...
Unlikely
> I saw a banana tree with green bananas in Switzerland
1) I believe you. This is not rare. Culturing a banana tree is super easy.
You can easily find one ornamental dwarf banana for your office in Zurich, put it outside in summer and enjoy the sight of the little green bananas. You just need lots of water, a decent sized pot (bananas can produce fruit in pots), some manure and a summer hot. All of this can be found in Switzerland.
Just don't expect fruit.
2) Growing bananas to their harvest time is the impossible part.
Flowers need to mature all winter long, and if they touch just a little chill, commercial banana fruits will stop growing, the stems will wither and collapse to the ground. They need more than 12 months of non-stop warm temperatures to became yellow and tasty. Your banana tree should be treated as an annual herb or kept indoors for many months each year.
But, there are more in this history.
There are around 50 species of banana trees. And lots of hybrids. There are yellow bananas, green bananas, lipstick pink bananas and steel blue bananas.
Some species evolved in mountains of tropical areas. Basically a temperate climate. The trunks that support the fruits can stand much more cold without dying. The problem is that they have small short bluish green bananas that don't worth the effort.
So far, those species are collector oddities or kept for hybridization purposes; but everybody in the field would salivate about breeding a seedless banana of decent quality that stands cold. This creatures are very productive.
They're more like pets in this sense. Really fun plants to have inside though.
Wong, 45, has presented for BBC series' Grow Your Own Drugs and Secrets of Your Food.
Curious what is the latest on genetic improvement of banana against Panama disease ?
Winters are too cold for them here. So either you heavily mulch them and they start from the roots every spring while the stems die in winter. Or you learn how to wrap the stems to protect them over winter.
It might be possible, or borderline to keep them unprotected within London but outside of there and inland temperatures can drop below -5C even in the South.
On the other hand, I think they have started growing tropical fruits like mangos and bananas in Sicily.
When I used to eat banana-flavored things (milkshakes, chocolate bars, etc), I always thought that the flavor was artifically inflated and tasted nothing like an actual banana...
...until I went to Fiji. Externally, the appearance of the banana would probably render it as waste in Western countries as it doesn't look nice and yellow - and looks close to what an overripe/rotten banana looks like, but gosh they tasted amazing!
An incredibly dystopian way to minimise human-caused climate change and potential extinction for yet more species.
Why are you adding something not mentioned to steer the conversation?