Edmond Albius's method of pollination is now used by all vanilla growers | Hacker News Reader

Edmond Albius's method of pollination is now used by all vanilla growers

nautil.us

124 pointsdnetesn18 comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIEVrBLmF70

I was curious to see if there was a video of it being done and this seems to be it. Incredibly delicate is an understatement.

Thank you for looking it up!

Is there a name for the practice of embedding a completely unrelated video into the middle of an article? I find this practice to be so mystifying. Does that work on readers?

Maybe it was written by an AI. I'm serious. That a human would leave out that crucial component is indeed boggling.

An AI. Writing and publishing a stream of mid-quality articles. With ads inserted. Profit. Occasionally insane.

Here's a strange quote from it:

> In the early 1800s, it was introduced to the Netherlands and France, where it ... became a hit with Elizabeth I, among other royals

Elizabeth I was English and died in 1603. Two centuries before the 1800s. I am suspicious of AI for this article too.

Nearly every place that has writers on staff for any purpose is trying to have 1/4 as many (at most) just edit AI output.

The way they tune productivity is deliberately reducing quality of the editing. I’m not kidding.

Thanks, it beggars belief that they could publish the article without such substantial piece of information.

Those vanilla plants can go fuck themselves. But seriously

I find this fascinating. But I’m really curious about whether this self pollination is causing problems with vanilla’s robustness due to a lack of cross pollination.

the seeds created by the self pollination aren't used to grow more vanilla plants the seed pods it creates are taken and processed.

To create more vanilla plants they take cuttings or similar methods to create a genetically identical plant without using a seed.

Exactly my thought, if the membrane was evolutionally justified, there has to be downsides

It's there to prevent self-polination.

Good for evolution, bad for a crop monoculture.

The membrane's evolutionary justification might be to force pollinators deeper into the flower, guaranteeing that it touches both the pollen and the stigma. It's a relatively common adaptation in flowers.

Evolution’s goals are different from vanilla ice cream makers’ goals.

What is this deft gesture? Is there a description of the actual method or how it works?

If it is this hard to pollinate how in the world did vanilla evolve to survive??

It survived just fine where it evolved, as the bee necessary for pollination was common.

Url changed from https://worldsensorium.com/the-boy-who-was-king-of-vanilla/, which points to this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com