Whoa, That’s Nuts! I Simply Realized the Reality About Corn Silks

I contemplate myself a deeply curious individual, however I generally marvel at what number of issues I work together with each day with out giving a second thought. Final night time, I used to be standing in my kitchen shucking each mature candy ears of corn and a few cute little child ones I had purchased on the farmers market as a result of I assumed my youngsters would get a kick out of them. As I pulled again the husk on the newborn corn, I seen that the silks appeared way more like superb hairs rooted in and rising immediately from the cob, like antennae from an insect’s head—noticeably completely different from the clingy however seemingly unfastened threads of silk on totally grown ears.

What are corn silks? I assumed to myself, whereas concurrently questioning: How, in my total lifetime of shucking corn, have I by no means requested this earlier than? And so it’s that I added reality No.54,679,832 to my operating psychological “whoa, that is nuts!” checklist, alongside shocking solutions to such gems as “what actually occurs when a caterpillar transforms right into a butterfly?” (That one nonetheless blows my thoughts!) All of those tidbits make me a lot of enjoyable at cocktail events.

Right here goes a solution: Ears of corn are clusters of feminine flowers, and the silks are their types and stigmas (the slender columns that catch and transport pollen all the way down to the egg). OK, that alone is not Earth-shattering information. However this is an excellent cooler reality: There may be one silk for each single kernel on the cob. Is not that tremendous? (And now all of Iowa laughs at this New York Metropolis native who’s simply realized one thing they’ve identified their total lives.)

The way in which it really works is that the corn plant is monoecious, that means every corn stalk comprises each sexes of flower: the male tassels on the high of the stalk, and the feminine ears rising beneath. When the male tassels of a corn plant launch pollen, the pollen is carried by the wind (not like many different flowers, which depend on bugs for pollination). The pollen can pollinate ears each on the identical plant and others close by that occur to catch the floating pollen grains.

When a pollen grain lands on a silk, it actually travels down the size of the silk into the corn husk till it reaches that silk’s egg cell situated on the “feminine inflorescence” (because the ear is extra precisely named). As soon as fertilized, every egg cell and its surrounding tissue swell to kind a single corn kernel. There’s a really one-to-one correspondence between silks and kernels, nearly like wires on an old school phone switchboard, every connecting particular person strains to calls from the skin world.

Simply ponder this for a second—an ear of corn is all the following: a flower, a group of eggs, these eggs as soon as grown into fruit, that are additionally, technically, seeds.

I’ll by no means have a look at a corn silk the identical once more; my annoyance with their presence has been changed with awe.