A single wild tree on a New Zealand island could soon get some neighbors

nationalgeographic.com

36 points·bryanrasmussen··5 comments

So were all the new seeds male, or does it just take a long time for this tree to sexually mature?

Basically, they figured out how to trick the female tree into producing fruit with viable seeds:

"Beever attempted to focus the tree’s attention—water and nutrients—on a single bunch of flowers.

After several trials, Beever found a way: a herbicide that mimics natural plant growth hormones. The solution, weak enough to avoid harming the prized plant, could help dissolve the hard exteriors of pollen grains to aid fertilization. Then, the hormones could amplify early signals transmitted by fertilized fruits back to the tree —think of tiny radio pings that say, hey, send more attention our way.

Such abundant indicators convinced the kaikōmako to unleash enough reproductive energy to develop mature purple fruits, less than a half-inch long, each containing a viable seed."

Is this tree special in being receptive to this technique, or is this broadly applicable to other trees/plants that are having trouble fertilizing for whatever reason?

It is pretty common to induce flowering of plants with gibberellin, for example cannabis.

Sorry meant *all female. I read the article including how they coaxed the seeds, but it's unclear to me what the seeds sprouted into.

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