Living Nurseries

10.17.18

I was never really a picky eater. Thanks to summers spent with my grandparents in India, I was raised on mangoes, lychees, and pungent-smelling jackfruit, so when my mom plopped a fresh fig in my 12-year-old hands, it seemed like child’s play.

But even today, the picture of the headless bug that stared back at me from the partially bitten fig is burned into my retinas.

Two sets of long, skinny legs dug into the fruit’s flesh. Rough-edged yellow stripes streaked across a mostly black abdomen. Looking at the narrow wings, I determined it to be a wasp. I wish I could say I knew what its facial features looked like––spoiler alert, I couldn’t because it was in my stomach.

To give her some credit, my mom was profusely apologetic that day, and she stopped trying to convince me to eat figs after a few futile attempts. (My dad wasn’t as nice and wheeze-laughed until a single tear streamed down his face. Classic.) Over time, my fig wasp evolved from mild childhood trauma into my shareable “fun fact,” whether during the painful icebreaker sessions on the first day of school, or during “two-truths-and-a-lie” roundabouts in the common room of my freshman-year dorm.

One girl questioned the validity of my story, though.

“Fig wasps are tiny,” she told me matter-of-factly, eyebrows furrowed, “there’s no way you would’ve seen it with your eyes.” Baffled, a little embarrassed, and now curious, I turned to the most reliable source my eighteen-year-old mind could muster to see if I could prove my story correct: the Internet.

Fig wasp, I typed in, and I was met with numerous pictures of green figs crawling with dark insects. They had lengthy, flat heads sitting atop two more body segments that appeared to be only slightly longer than their faces.

I clicked on an image that magnified their rounded wings. My eyes traced the long, thin veins that created the illusion of wrinkles as the translucent structures reflected light, recalling the various shattered-glass patterns I’ve seen in other flying bugs––jagged edges in hornet wings, triangle puzzle pieces fitting together in beetle wings, mosaic shards of dragonfly wings perfectly flush with one another. The fig wasp’s wings looked like gently creased paper, and to my eyes, they appeared more like flies than wasps. A long, thin structure protruded from their abdomens, but it seemed too long to be a stinger.

Much to my chagrin, the girl was right about her correction. As I continued scrolling, I retrieved the mental image of my own “fig wasp” and confirmed that, indeed, I must have just chomped some poor bug that was hiding behind my grubby pre-teen fingers as they held the fruit.

I clicked through even more web pages. I watched a fig wasp’s iridescent wings detach from her body along with her antennae as she crawled into a male fig––a caprifig, the video informed me––to lay her eggs. The long structure that I thought to be a stinger turned out to be her egg-laying mechanism. She placed her eggs into each tiny tube-shaped flower, all contained within the fig’s outer wall away from battering wind or predatory insects. Another bug, some kind of fly, tried to burrow through the same entrance that the wasp did to reach the concealed flowers, but had no such luck.

Some of the flowers began to sway back and forth as tiny insects broke from their individual sacks where they had developed — sacks called galls, the narrator said. Their amber-colored bodies were hunched over, and they explored the inside of the fig in a way that reminded me of a Labrador retriever on the trail of a rabbit, waving their mandibles around.

I prepared to watch them exit the fig through the same hole that their mother had entered, one behind another in a line like ants marching toward an unsuspecting kitchen pantry. I assumed they would swarm out of the fruit, leaving their wingless mother behind as they searched for new figs to parasitize. But then, I noticed that these tiny wasps didn’t have wings to begin with, not even the beginnings of stubs from which shining wings like their mother’s could sprout.

To my surprise, the wingless wasps found their way to other flower openings. The video narrator informed me that yes, indeed, these male fig wasps impregnated their sisters before they even hatched by injecting them through the skin of the gall. And instead of leaving through the small opening in the bottom of the fig, these male wasps chewed minuscule tunnels through the walls of the fig in a desperate attempt to escape––to where, I still wonder, considering they have no realistic means of navigating any other environment besides the fig. The ones that made it to the surface practically fell out of the holes they created.

The next wave of wasps emerged into the fig cavity, this time all winged. Their limbs were dusted with golden pollen flecks from the depths of the flowers, and I watched them tackle the same treacherous journey their brothers had, even following their exact microscopic, chewed-out pathways in many cases. Unlike the floundering wingless males, they breached the barrier to the outside world with a flourish, leaping into the wind currents in search of a new home.

The mother wasp, still inside the fig, was long dead. Some of the tiny male wasps, trapped within the flesh of the fruit, also lay frozen within the meat of the fruit. There was an eerie stillness, a stark contrast to the life I had seen bursting just 30 seconds before.

But just as before, in every moment I thought the cycle was over, I was met with a new wave of change. The hundreds of slender, compact flowers swelled pink and red as small, orange seeds hardened inside each one. This ripened fruit at the end of the timelapse was a product of the mother wasp’s journey from her own birthplace––another growing fig fruit that showered her with pollen as she crawled out to continue her own life cycle. In the end, her quest to build a new generation of fig wasps saved an unpromising, unpollinated fig from being dropped into fruitless decomposition by its tree. What I thought to be a parasite had turned out to be an ally in survival.

That weekend, I sliced open a fig for the first time in years. I examined the same seeds I watched come to life online and scanned the meat of the fig for tiny embedded fig wasps, this time my mind void of images of the first fateful insect I encountered all those years ago.

But the rosy fruit seemed to be just that––fruit. Unfortunately, not a single insect. Upon further web searches, I found that ripened figs digest and recycle nutrients from their wasp occupants because of a protein called ficin in the fruit.

If I ever get my hands on a wild fig, I’m going to plant its seeds. The figs my mother brings home from farmer’s market trips don’t usually have any (trust me, I’ve searched), meaning that their trees somehow don’t rely on wasps to continue their life cycles. But personally, I’d love to catch a glimpse of those incredible crushed-paper wings flying between their living nurseries in person.