The final length scale that I will be observing the banana on is the millimeter length scale (picture below). The useless vestigial seeds of the bananas are about a millimeter across. They are soft and the yellow fruit flesh around the seeds is slightly darker than the rest of the banana. It looks similar to a large vein or tube that could store or transport water or nutrients to the banana, much like transport systems that can be found in other places in nature, like how trees deliver nutrients and water to extremities via tubes in the branches. There are clumps of these black seeds near the middle that seem to run all the way up and down the banana. As I posted before, today’s edible bananas are grown by cutting and grafting limbs of other banana trees. The shrinkage of biological parts that have become useless is a pattern that is frequently shown in nature. As a consequence of natural selection (or in this case, artificial, the robustness of the seeds no longer has any say in how well the bananas reproduce and it is also possible that the farmers who grow the bananas that we eat today specifically selected banana trees that produced seeds that were tinier in order to maximize the taste, as the seeds were no longer an indicator of the healthiness and viability of the trees. Natural selection has shown that no longer useful organs or body parts such as the tailbone or appendix in humans have gotten small and have no vital use for the body. Closer similarities are apparent in seedless watermelons and seedless grapes, which are also produced by artificial breeding ("Seedless fruit," 2009). Well, that’s about as much analysis I can do on bananas. After doing this assignment, I find that the structure of the banana has much more similarities to other things in nature than I would have thought. I initially only thought that I could find structural similarities between bananas and other fruit; I did not expect to find comparisons to things as different as animals or trees. When I really analyzed and thought about the basic function as well as the connection between the structure and what it was used for, many more comparisons in nature opened up.


(2009). Seedless fruit. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/f/fruit.htm