:: MAD Science ::

Fun gadgets and technology reviews, neat home experiments and answers to your questions about anything science - from why the sky is blue to why boogers are green.

This article is by Ryan Costello, Jr. - Click for all articles by this author.

BaNaNaS ! ! ! By Ryan Costello, Jr.

Bananas are amazing.


Delicious and healthy. Seedless. They even come in their own wrapper.


Great with ice cream. Great with chocolate. Great with ice cream and chocolate.


What a wonderful fruit. And funny. Think of all the ways bananas make people laugh.


Hold it to your ear – banana-phone. Grab it by the tip – banana-gun.


And the banana has also been the star of many cartoons.


If you’re young, the first funny banana cartoon you ever saw was probably Peanut Butter Jelly Time. If you’re a little older, maybe you watched Bugs Bunny drop a banana peel on the floor and laugh when Daffy Duck slipped on it and crashed into something.


But have you ever wondered about all those cartoon characters that have slipped on banana peels? Do you think there’s any truth behind it? Unfortunately, there are a lot of things in cartoons that just don’t work in real life.


One example is the bucket of water on the door. I put a bucket full of water on the bathroom door one time. I thought it would turn over and drench my brother, and like on cartoons, he would end up with a bucket on his head. Instead, the bucket fell straight down and hit him and water got everywhere.


At that point, I started to realize that things in cartoons are funny, but they can trick you into believing something impossible is possible.


Now back to the banana. Were the Warner Brothers, the men behind Bugs Bunny cartoons, just creating the idea of slipping on a banana peel? Well, if you have a banana handy, why not test this scientifically.


First, eat the banana. When you’re done, don’t throw out the peel, but don’t drop it on the floor unless you’re ready to clean it up. Just look at it from the inside. It’s soft and fluffy, a bit like a mop. There isn’t anything slippery about it. If you did drop it on the floor – and again, please don’t unless you want a mess – and someone stepped on it, they would squish it and that’s about all.


Does that mean what you see in cartoons are untrue? Sometimes that is the case, but you must also take into account when something was made. When the Bugs Bunny cartoons were made, bananas were much different.


Think of bananas kind of like dogs. There are different breeds of dogs. Some are very different, like Chihuahuas and French Poodles. Some are very similar, like Labradors and German Shepherds. Well, bananas have breeds too.


The modern dessert banana, like the banana you ate earlier in the story, was a Cavendish banana. In fact, every banana you’ve eaten in your lifetime was probably a Cavendish, unless you got it outside North American and Europe, or if it wasn’t sweet.


Fifty years ago, the popular banana was the Gros Michel (French for “Big Mike”). These bananas were bigger and greasier. That grease didn’t just give them a different flavor, but also made the peel slick on the inside. So if a peel landed yellow side up and you stepped on it, you could slip. Your crash might not be as entertaining as Daffy Duck’s, but you could fall down.


So why don’t we eat Big Mike anymore? Unlike VCRs, fruit don’t become obsolete. They didn’t build a better banana. It’s because Big Mike is extinct. The entire breed doesn’t exist anymore. Why? Well, remember bananas are seedless. That makes them easier for us to eat, but it means they can’t grow on their own.


Scientists and farmers got together to make Big Mike bananas sterile, which is like sending your dog to the vet to get fixed, or neutered. If every dog of a certain breed was neutered, eventually there wouldn’t be any more dogs of that breed


And that’s exactly what the scientists did to Big Mike. For decades, they were artificially recreating bananas so that we never had to worry about eating seeds. But it meant they weren’t evolving, and couldn’t build new immunities. So eventually, Big Mike caught a disease, and the breed was so weak that every Big Mike banana plant died.


If you’ve ever wondered why we say plants are alive even though they don’t talk or think, it’s because they’re like us in other ways. They grow. They reproduce. And they can get sick. That’s why Big Mike isn’t around anymore.


Some scientists speculate that Cavendish bananas might not be around in ten years either. So enjoy your bananas while you can, because quicker than Daffy Duck could crash in a cartoon, there could be a whole new breed of banana in town.