Hello,
David in his original posting was trying to determine if there might be some caprifigs and fig wasps nearby his place since there were fig seedlings under his trees. After some time he discovered something that is very interesting to me.
Apomixis is the process of producing viable seeds without pollination and there are two sub varieties according to this article.
1) Parthenogenesis - in this process the "seed" that is produced may result in some genetic variability amongst the progeny.
2) Agamospermy - This process results in a "seed" that is an identical clone of the female tree.
Being limited on time at right now, I only did some quick searching through some electronic documents that I have collected and found very little information pertaining to this topic. If I read what I did find correctly, it appears that some of the older papers suggest that this process does not even occur in ficus - so this may be a more recent bit of scientific knowledge.
The parthenogenesis process makes me wonder about the phenomenon that I hear described from time to time that "this fig is a mutation of the parent." In this situation, according to the description, there is just a small amount of genetic change.
With agamospermy, the Wayne's Word article suggests that an identical clone of the parent female tree could be propagated without the transmission of viruses.
Currently the big unanswered question for me is the frequency factor. How often does this happen? I am also wondering how one would determine which one of the two sub categories of apomixis actually occurred.
I am not sure of where this specific information was gleaned from. There are some references at the bottom of the page on Wayne's Word but don't know which is tied to the bits of information above. If anyone has some ideas or experience with this process, I would appreciate a response.
Ingevald