The avocado's sex life has run on the same schedule for 42 million years
The avocado's sex life has run on the same schedule for 42 million years Jason Weisberger 3:46 pm Fri Jul 31, 2026 Alexis Foto Guevara/shutterstock.com Avocado flowers perform the duty of both female and male flowers. The gene that controls them has been unchanged for 42 million years. Each avocado flower opens twice over two days: first in its female phase, when it can receive pollen, and later in its male phase, when it releases pollen.
- ▪The avocado's sex life has run on the same schedule for 42 million years Jason Weisberger 3:46 pm Fri Jul 31, 2026 Alexis Foto Guevara/shutterstock.com Avocado flowers perform the duty of both female and male flowers.
- ▪The gene that controls them has been unchanged for 42 million years.
- ▪Each avocado flower opens twice over two days: first in its female phase, when it can receive pollen, and later in its male phase, when it releases pollen.
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Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/07/31/avocado-flower-sex-schedule-gene.html |
| Publication time | Fri, 31 Jul 2026 22:46:55 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-31T23:43:39.996Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-31T23:43:39.996Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 2odvFKG9d42n · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The avocado's sex life has run on the same schedule for 42 million years Jason Weisberger 3:46 pm Fri Jul 31, 2026 Alexis Foto Guevara/shutterstock.com Avocado flowers perform the duty of both female and male flowers. The gene that controls them has been unchanged for 42 million years. Each avocado flower opens twice over two days: first in its female phase, when it can receive pollen, and later in its male phase, when it releases pollen. Some plant varieties start this in the mornings, and others in the afternoon, greatly aiding in pollination. The popular Hass is an A-type avocado. Growers will mix B-type pollinizers into their groves to improve fruit production. Problematically, the buddy trees produce less marketable fruit, but take up space and resources.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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