Corn on the cob

Following the appearance of corn on the cob at the end of reference 1, I thought I would take a look at a cob that happened to be in the refrigerator this morning - something that BH still has stomach for, unlike yours truly. The point of interest being the claim that the grains occur in pairs.

Rather soft and pale, not much like the stuff that is grown here and appears rather later in the summer, from Spain via Sainsbury's.

Viewed from the bottom end, the end that was attached to the plant, where you do indeed appear to have six pairs, making the core look more hexagonal than circular.

Guessing, I would say that six is the usual number of pairs. Not universal, but common. In the same way that flowers of the same kind nearly always have the same number of petals.

Bottom end left. Guessing again because I forget to mark the ends of the rows and the cob has now been eaten, I would say that we have a pair of rows above the bit of covering leaf. The line between two rows of a pair is straighter than the line between two rows from adjacent pairs.

And while the number of rows may be fixed at twelve, maybe the number of grains in a row varies with the circumstances of growth.

Bottom end right. Guessing yet again, I would say the two rows upper middle, third and fourth from the bottom are the pair. The line between them is straighter than the line below.

The orange dots right and left mark the paired rows. The orange line marks a segment where the pairing breaks down a bit because a grain on the bottom row is missing.

The view at the top, at the thin end, not so clear. Maybe one would do better if one cut the top half inch off.

But even so, the two grains marked with orange spots look like a good pair.

And here, having moved below the bit of covering leaf above, we have a couple more anomalies. First, one pair has become a triple, with what looks like an extra intruded into the middle of the pair. I could probably have learned more by cutting the cob just to one side of the anomaly. Second, to the right, the pairing seems to have broken down. Maybe a grain in the lower of the pair of rows is missing.

With the two oranges spots marking the spots. Whatever is going on does not go on with mathematical regularity. A reminder that it is not always easy to reconcile the nice tidy diagrams of biologists with what one sees down the microscope, Or put another way, a reminder of the difficulty that computers used to have labelling images without help from humans.

Maybe the next step is to buy some cobs for dissection rather than consumption.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/06/trolleys-705-706-and-707.html.