"The Fig Wasp (Agaonidae family) maintains with the fig (Ficus, approximately eight hundred species) what is, in the author's assessment after two volumes of field work, the most complete partnership documented in nature. Each fig species has one wasp species. Each wasp species has one fig. The female enters the fig through the ostiole — a pore at the base — losing her wings and antennae in the process, pollinates the flowers inside, lays her eggs, and dies inside. The male is born inside the fig without wings, fertilises the females, chews an exit tunnel, and dies inside. Neither ever reproduces elsewhere. The partnership has been running for ninety million years. The fig is not a fruit; it is an inverted flower. The author has been eating figs at camp since the first morning of this volume. He notes that male wasps chewing exit tunnels simultaneously produce a faint audible hum inside the syconium. He did not know this before breakfast. He knows it now."
He picked up the fig at breakfast without particular attention.
He had been doing this since the first camp. The wild fig overhung the camp table and dropped its fruit in the morning and he ate them because they were there and they were good and they were the kind of thing the bush provided without being asked. He had noted the tree in the margins of three entries — wild fig, camp vicinity, fruit present — and had not investigated further because a fig was a fig and he had been in Africa long enough to have settled the question of what figs were.
He looked at it more carefully.
He had been looking at things more carefully. The vulture had required revision. The bat had required staying up. The fig required only holding it in his hand at breakfast and asking what it was, which he now did, and which Cetshwayo did not answer immediately, which meant the answer was more interesting than the Colonel had expected.
He opened the reference.
It was not a fruit.
He read this sentence. He looked at the fig. He read the sentence again.
A syconium — an inverted inflorescence. Every flower on the inside. The structure in his hand contained flowers, in the past tense, which had been pollinated in the dark by an animal he could not see, and were now seeds, and were also — he read further — the remains of that animal, broken down by the enzyme ficin into the general substance of what he was eating.
He put the fig down.
He read the section on ficin. He picked the fig up again. He wrote one sentence about ficin and did not expand the sentence because the sentence required no expansion and further sentences on the subject would not improve his breakfast.
He continued reading.
The female entered through the ostiole — the pore at the base of the fig, exactly large enough for her body and no larger. She forced through it, losing her wings and antennae in the process, and moved inside the dark structure finding the flowers and the places for her eggs, and she pollinated and she laid and she died inside.
She went in once. She did not come out.
The male was born inside the fig. He had no wings. He had never seen the outside of a fig and he would not. His function was to find the females before they left and to chew through the wall of the fig — the exit tunnel, from inside, in the dark — so they could escape carrying pollen to the next fig.