False fruit

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The strawberry false fruit , the actual fruits are the yellowish nuts on the surface

In botany, the term false fruit describes the phenomenon that a whole fruit cluster, together with components that do not originally belong to the gynoeceum, form a fruit unit (pseudocarp, anthocarp). In addition to the gynoeceum, components of this fruit unit can be, for example, bracts , parts of the stem axis in the area of ​​the inflorescence or the widened and fruit-forming flower base (receptacle), as well as parts of the perianth .

A distinction must be made between collective fruits that arise from several ovaries of a flower and fruit associations that arise from the flowers of an inflorescence.

Above all, representatives of the rose family , which include many well-known types of fruit , produce false fruits, which in these cases arise from a single flower. A well-known example is the strawberry . From the numerous existing carpels resulting individual fruits are Nuts and in their entirety as collective nut fruit called. The individual, very small fruits sit on the thickened, cone-shaped, tall flower base, which contains over 200 different aromatic substances , with which they together form the false fruit and are consumed as "fruit". The cultivated apple is also a dummy fruit. Here, after fertilization, five individual follicles emerge from the five carpels surrounded by the flower base. The base of the flower itself this develops also on and wrapped in fruit ripening, the completely Sammelbalgfrucht (consisting of the Balgfrüchten) in the so-called core.

Further examples of false fruits are the fruit associations of the pineapple (from numerous individual berries , former bracts and stem tissue) or the fig (overgrowth of the individual nut fruits through the jug-shaped flower base).

literature

  • Rudolf Schubert, Günter Wagner: Botanical dictionary. 11th edition. Eugen Ulmer Verlag, Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-8252-1476-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfgang Stuppy: Glossary of Seed and Fruit Morphological Terms - Kew Gardens. 2004, online ( memento of August 2, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF), search: "Pseudocarp".