Why are bananas curved in shape??

Here is a banana, a fruit which is normally seen to be curved in shape 

Rather than going straight down, it moves with a slight tilt upwards. Now we all can agree the nature has it own beautiful way of making us amazed at they way things work, how things happen.. more on this in some other time, but here.. why do bananas are shaped like that is the question..

Let's understand that by understanding a phenomenon called as Gravitropism or Geotropism. Let me bold and caps that out.

GRAVI/GEO TROPISM !!!!!

well to understand this phenomenon further, there are two words here, gravi/geo and tropism. Tropism essentially means movement of a part or entirety of an organism in response to an external stimuli. Gravi or Geo basically here means gravity. So GeoTropism can be loosely understood to be movement in influence of gravity.

Now there is positive and negative geotropism. Positive Geotropism is where the movement is with the gravitational force and Negative Geotropism, you might have guessed it by now; moving against or opposite to the influence of gravity.

And also you might have guessed it that bananas in this case display on some small levels a negative geotropism.

Now when we say that bananas exhibits negative geo tropism, we can also say that bananas are exhibiting a behavior called as  phototropism i.e. moving towards sunlight.

The hormone or phytohormone which is responsible for this behavior in bananas is called as AUXIN which is kind of a powerful growth hormone in plants.

On exposure to sunlight, this hormone is said to move from higher exposure of light to lesser exposure i.e. from sunlight side to the shaded side. Now increased concentration of this growth hormone on one side causes the shaded side to grow. Added to the process the gravitation force which kind of pulls the fruit more downwards resulting in the curved shape of the fruit.

Just so you know not all species of banana exhibit this behavior. It all depends on the species, the environment and possible other factors like surrounding area and many more.

Also, do you know cucumbers are said to another example of possible same behavior.

Well, that's quite amazing and beautiful about nature ain't it?? That's about it for now..

Until next time, keep the curiousity up and running!!

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