Why are peaches and some other fruits fuzzy?
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From the brains behind brains on, this is the Moment of Um. Answering those questions that make you go... Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Molly Bloom. Um...

Thanks for coming grocery shopping with me today, Lulu. Yeah, I like to check on all my favorite fruits and veggies. What's up, bananas? Looking good, Snappies. Okay, milk, eggs, cereal. Hey, Lulu, we're almost done getting everything on the grocery list. Is there anything else you want to pick out? Can we get peaches, too?

The ones over here smell really good. Sure, I do love a stone fruit. Do you want to grab a few? Hey, yeah, this peach has full. Wait, is fruit supposed to have full? Is a peach an animal? Can I have a pet peach? Um, we can talk about a pet peach later, but I do know a little bit about fruit fuzz, thanks to a moment of um question we got from a listener. I want to know why peaches have fuzz on them.

My name is Dario Chavez and I am an associate professor at the University of Georgia. I work in teach research.

In reality, the fuzz and fruit are like hairs and generally speaking they are known as trichomes. And what they do is they protect the fruit from basically weather, changes of humidity, water, pests, insects. So it's basically like a protection layer, like a shield for the fruit.

Besides the trichomes, there is always the skin, the cuticle layer of the fruit, similar to what is our skin and our hairs, right? Let's say the hairs is the fuzz, and we have a skin layer as well. So the skin layer has certain properties as well that are somewhat similar to the trichomes, but they do have differences in properties as well.

Some of those contain waxes that will basically avoid water to come in. Some others will protect also against different predators. The skin and the trichomes, they're actually two layers that are protecting the fruit.

The fun fact is that nectarines is actually a mutation that appear in peaches, a gene that removes the hair or the pus out of the peach. For example, in the southeast, let's say Georgia, Florida, Alabama, South Carolina,

Generally speaking, we grow a lot of peaches. Nectarines are few because of our weather conditions, a lot of rain, humidity, a lot of pests. It makes it quite difficult to grow nectarines. And then if you compare to the production in California, for example, that's more like drier conditions. You have large production of nectarines besides also the peaches as well.

So you can see how certain conditions will differentiate one of the productions. So that cause that we have in peaches basically protect the fruit for us to be able to be growing here in the southeastern U.S. Um, uh,

Having fur doesn't make peaches an animal. Sorry, Lulu. But it does protect the delicate fruit from getting too wet or getting eaten by bugs. The same is true for kiwis and other fruit with fuzzy skin. And speaking of fruit skin, nectarines are basically identical to peaches, except for a slight difference in their DNA that makes nectarine skin smooth, not furry. In fact, you can sometimes find peaches and nectarines growing on the same tree. That's

That's really cool, Mom, but I'm getting hungry. Can we make fruit smoothies when we get home? I think that sounds peachy.

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