So, what does pollination really do to figs?

[Rob]

When pollen is inadvertently dropped by wasps, or is just brushed from wasps as they make their way around the inside of all figs, it is capable of triggering growth of a seed. Long and short styled female flowers look like this, the blue circled area below, and not with a single tip as we see so often in books and studies, but a forked style. In the centre is where the egg is inserted in a short style and also where a pollen tube enters the flower to pollinate seeds. More about this below....

Long styles1.jpg

My image from early 2024 in Australia.
Even Condit got is correct in his1947 book, The Fig, with this image below...

Condit I. J. The Fig.pdf.png

These female flowers have very sticky styles, and if a pollen grain finds itself near the tip of the style, it can begin to grow what they call pollen tubes, this is pollen germination, and the small tubes find their way down the same path as when a fig wasp, (the stylar canal) using her ovipositer, inserts an egg in a caprifig. The pollen tube is what fertilizers the seed in a female fig flower, and it can grow. When they test pollen viability in labs on a glass slide, they always add sucrose to the water, this is done to replicate the conditions inside a fig, and a pollen grain will not grow without it. If a flower also has an egg inserted in it, the egg will always take precedence, and the wasp larvae will grow, not the seed. This is what the pollen tubes look like as they just begin to grow from the pollen...below, like little arms reaching out.

Pollen germination..jpg

If time permits, this season coming, I will try to document pollen growth in a fig to show this, since as far as I am aware, this has not been done yet, but I think it would be interesting to see.