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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

Ripe figs are delicious, and knowing that they've also, potentially killed a wasp - man's greatest enemy - only makes their nectar sweeter to my tongue.

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The knowledge of enclosed vespine corpses just adds one more item to my growing list of things I hate about fig trees, of which I have two. Two fig trees are at least one and probably two fig trees too many. Too much pruning is required because spring growth is extensive. Too much fall raking is required because there's a ton of foliage too. But the real pain in the ass is harvesting. Figs really have to ripen on the tree, but as soon as they're ripe they're liable to fall. Without daily vigilance, a big crop will result in lots of smashed, rotting fruit on the ground, which sticks with insane determination to the soles of unwary shoes. Naturally in the season of maturation the fig tree is also the haunt of 17.6 billion insects of every variety, so while it provides ample shade from the sun, it's better to just suck it up and burn. Also less than the most satisfying experience of one's life is picking figs from the tree with a view to either engaging in the messy and overrated process of eating them, the laborious and not especially rewarding process of drying them, or merely in the pathetically futile effort to protect the ground beneath. Mucking about in the middle of that foliage is massively irritating to any exposed skin because of the sticky residue that seems to find its disgusting way onto every leaf and branch. The severity of this irritation is such that extraordinary caution is recommended before following the presumably divinely-inspired path towards modesty followed by Adam and Eve.

On our fig tree, the figs ripen without falling off. But, it's a race to get to them before the local fauna: they seem to be a real delicacy for birds and wasps. Later in the season, half-eaten figs (ripe, brown and wrinkled) fill the topmost branches, attended by crowds of wasps.

When I pick them, I go in a T-shirt and shorts. Yes, the leaves are sticky - but not irritating in the slightest. It's usually a warm humid day anyway, so a cold shower is very refreshing.

And as for the figs: infinitely more delicious than anything from grocery stores. Messy to eat? Less messy than an apple.

I think we must be referring to different types of trees...

You my friend, have some serious fig issues and have created the most compelling case I have ever heard for NOT planting a fig tree, ever.

Time to quibble!

1.) Wasps as man's greatest enemy? Really?

If we were being poetic, here, then I'd say that Man's greatest enemy is Man themselves, but this is HN, so I won't. For a runner up, I would at least choose an animal that can actually kill a healthy human, rather than one that and annoy a healthy human and kill a subset with allergic reactions of venom.

2.) There are a lot of species of wasp. According to wikipedia, 160,000. Not all of them will sting, or even can sting humans. Fig wasps count among them. There are quite a few wasps that are beneficial, in that they predate upon insects that are slightly more annoying than the wasps themselves.

3.) Nectar is produced (generally) by flowers, to attract pollinators. By design, it's easily accessible by insects, and not protected by the rind of a fruit. The juice of a fruit is just juice, not nectar.

Nectar is also a term used for sweetened and watered down (until it is drinkable) fruit puree. I haven't seen any recently, but you used to be able to buy apricot nectar at any grocery store, and gourmet food shops often had pear and peach nectars as well (and rarely oddballs like plum or blackberry).

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Meta-quibble: A fig is a modified inflorescence (more precisely, a synconium), and can contain many hundred nectar producing flowers.

How about one that kills one to three million humans, mostly very young children, every year? The mosquito is man's greatest animal enemy. Actually, I think it's safe to say that mosquito is a worse enemy to man than man himself, since mosquito-borne malaria has been responsible for many more deaths than all the wars in history.

Big predators, on the other hand, like bears or lions, which are physically capable of killing a human single-handedly, are responsible for so few human deaths as to be lost in statistical noise.

Surely it is the malaria parasite that is the killer, rather than the mosquito?

The mosquito is the vector of transmission, so the couple mosquito-parasite makes it an enemy as a whole.

And the guy sitting in jail isn't the killer, but his gun? No, strike that. It's not the gun, but the bullet.

One could view it as an accidental death. The mosquito didn't intend to transmit malaria, or to kill the child, it was just a side effect of what it does every day. Though, mosquitoes being parasitic by nature, they aren't very respectful of human right to property (they steal people's blood for a living, after all). Maybe more like an alcoholic who drives drunk.

Anyway, I like your analogy as an answer to the mosquito vs. malaria blame game, but it may be impossible to directly compare a mosquito-inflicted death to one caused by a human in any fashion.

In short, blame is irrelevant...human rights trump mosquito (or malaria) rights, IMNSHO, so if we could somehow destroy mosquitoes (and/or malaria) entirely in the sub-Saharan region, that'd be entirely alright with me, to hell with the consequences (some argue it would impact other wildlife, as mosquitoes are a food source for birds, as well as a pollinator for some plants, and those birds and plants are a food source for bigger animals, etc.).

Mosquitoes are not wasps, and I'm pretty sure fig wasps don't carry malaria.

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