Here’s How Giant Pumpkins Get So Big
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Here's how giant pumpkins get so big:
Cinderella has to get to the ball. How to reach the palace on time? Her fairy godmother waves a wand, and poof! A nearby pumpkin morphs into a beautiful carriage.
The fairy godmother is a magical stretch, but massive pumpkins are very real. The huge ones you might see at your local fall fair are Atlantic giant pumpkins (Cucurbita maxima). It's not the species that we eat and carve, says Jessica Savage. A botanist at the University of Minnesota, in Duluth, she's someone who studies plants.
The Atlantic giant truly is a goliath. People compete every year to produce the largest. One grower in Germany set the record for the world's heaviest in 2016 with a squash that tipped the scales at 1,190.49 kilograms (2,624.6 pounds). It weighed more than some small cars.
What's really astonishing, Savage says, is that pumpkins can get that big in the first place. After seeing photos of giant pumpkins at the Topsfield Fair in Topsfield, Mass., she became fascinated by a problem. A transport problem.
Journal Reference:
JESSICA A. SAVAGE, DUSTIN F. HAINES, N. MICHELE HOLBROOK. The making of giant pumpkins: how selective breeding changed the phloem of Cucurbita maxima from source to sink, Plant, Cell & Environment (DOI: 10.1111/pce.12502)
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