The problem with modern avocados — and the ancient solution
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Hey, short wavers. I'm still Nate Rott.
And I'm Hannah Chen.
With our biweekly science news roundup featuring the one, the only, the exquisite Elsa Chang, of all things considered.
Nate Rott, you're very exquisite, too. Thank you so much for having me again, guys.
I'm happy you're here. Okay, so this week we've got a few discoveries that help us better understand this wacky world that we're all living in. The first is a discovery about ancient avocados, which are my favorite kind to eat. that could help us keep slathering our chips with guacamole today.
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All right, Hannah and Elsa, we've got a lot to get into.
Let's start with ancient avocados. Is my avocado toast in danger here? Well, not yet. So when you pick up avocados at the grocery store or when you get guac in your burrito, chances are that it's from a single type of avocado. It's called the Haas avocado. Right. And Elsa, this type of avocado makes up more than 80% of commercial avocado production.
Which is, you know, kind of convenient because it means that our avocados tend to be like consistent in their size, shape, flavor-wise. But because they're all genetically identical, they're all susceptible to diseases in the exact same way.
Oh, like farmers are putting all their eggs or avocados, shall we say, in one basket here? So are there other varieties of avocados that we could grow so there's sort of like genetic variation? Yeah, there are. And a lot of them look very different.
They're bigger, they're whiter, they're glossier, less bumpy, usually like lighter green, sometimes come in different shapes and sizes. And on the inside, they tend to be less fatty.
So this is archaeobotanist Kevin Wan. He's a fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and a PhD candidate at Texas A&M doing avocado research. Even though up until a couple of years ago, he'd never tasted one.
I was going to see if I could go my entire PhD studying avocados. without ever having eaten one or eaten guacamole.
But what Kevin wanted to know was how much genetic diversity he was dealing with.
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