Kingmakers: Meet the insects that make India’s famed mangoes
More than a thousand varieties of mangoes exist in India, the popular ones being Banganapalli, Dassheri, Alphonso, Badaami, Imaam Pasandh, and Mulgoa. There is even
More than a thousand varieties of mangoes exist in India, the popular ones being Banganapalli, Dassheri, Alphonso, Badaami, Imaam Pasandh, and Mulgoa. There is even a “Lalbagh” variety in Bengaluru. Many of us associate the fruit with a summer childhood memory, of eating it with our bare hands, the mango juice dripping on our clothes. More recently, the fruit has become popular on social media platforms, where users explain hundreds of ways to cook and eat it. This year, the fruit’s popularity reached a new height: the red carpet at the Met Gala in New York. Mangoes and Indian summers go hand-in-hand, yet do you know how this fruit comes to be? In other words, the mango tree gives out flowers… and then what happens? Making a mango Between December and March every year, mango trees across the country bloom and issue a sweet yet slightly fermented odour. Look closer at a mango tree in this time and you will find a branch with several bouquets of small, cream-coloured flowers. Each branch, which botanists call a panicle, contains a few hundred to up to 10,000 individual flowers. And a single mango tree can carry up to some 3,000 panicles, depending on its size and branching. Each one of these flowers is the start of a mango in the making. Some flowers carry only the male parts while others only the female parts, and sometimes there can be flowers with both (which are biologically called hermaphrodites). Regardless, for the mango to form, pollen must travel between these flowers. This is where pollinators make their mark. There is a curious history here.
Mango cultivars had once insisted that mango flowers are pollinated only by wind. But this theory could not explain why the flowers issued a sweet odour. It had to be to attract insects. To confirm that insects were indeed pollinators, researchers in Bengaluru teamed up with their peers from Germany to survey several Badami mango farms in the city’s urban and rural areas. Their findings, published in 2023, were striking: when flying insects were excluded from visiting the flowers, the mango yield dropped as much as 350% compared to when flowers were left open to all visitors. These flying insects were found to include wild bees such as the dwarf honey bee (Apis florea), giant honey bee (Apis dorsata), and stingless bees (Tetragonula sp.). Other important flying visitors included hoverflies, which look like bees (Syrphus sp.), the common house fly (Musca domestica), and the blow fly (Calliphoridae family). Effective pollination The researchers also observed that the mango yields dropped when they barred crawling insects, such as ants, from the flowers. Soubadra Devy, a senior researcher at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bengaluru, and an author of the study, said ants are “messy pollinators” and that it is essential to investigate them as pollinators of mango in future studies. Devy also said she anticipates that the pollinator community is not any different for other Indian mango varieties since the “floral traits, i.e. the flower structure, pollen, and nectar are likely to be very similar”. Researchers have conducted similar studies in Mexico, on the ‘Ataulfo’ mango, and in Australia, on the ‘Kensington Pride’ variety — and have revealed similar findings.
The BriefWire