Whoa, That’s Nuts! I Just Learned the Truth About Corn Silks

I consider myself a deeply curious person, but I sometimes marvel at how many things I interact with daily without giving a second thought. Last night, I was standing in my kitchen shucking both mature sweet ears of corn and some cute little baby ones I had bought at the farmers market because I thought my kids would get a kick out of them. As I pulled back the husk on the baby corn, I noticed that the silks looked much more like fine hairs rooted in and growing directly from the cob, like antennae from an insect's head—noticeably different from the clingy but seemingly loose threads of silk on fully grown ears.

What are corn silks? I thought to myself, while simultaneously wondering: How, in my entire life of shucking corn, have I never asked this before? And so it is that I added fact No.54,679,832 to my running mental "whoa, that's nuts!" list, alongside surprising answers to such gems as "what really happens when a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly?" (That one still blows my mind!) All of these tidbits make me lots of fun at cocktail parties.

Here goes an answer: Ears of corn are clusters of female flowers, and the silks are their styles and stigmas (the slender columns that catch and transport pollen down to the egg). OK, that alone isn't Earth-shattering news. But here's an even cooler fact: There is one silk for every single kernel on the cob. Isn't that amazing? (And now all of Iowa laughs at this New York City native who's just learned something they've known their entire lives.)

The way it works is that the corn plant is monoecious, meaning each corn stalk contains both sexes of flower: the male tassels at the top of the stalk, and the female ears growing below. When the male tassels of a corn plant release pollen, the pollen is carried by the wind (unlike many other flowers, which rely on insects for pollination). The pollen can pollinate ears both on the same plant and others nearby that happen to catch the floating pollen grains.

When a pollen grain lands on a silk, it literally travels down the length of the silk into the corn husk until it reaches that silk's egg cell located on the "female inflorescence" (as the ear is more accurately named). Once fertilized, each egg cell and its surrounding tissue swell to form a single corn kernel. There is a truly one-to-one correspondence between silks and kernels, almost like wires on an old-fashioned telephone switchboard, each connecting individual lines to calls from the outside world.

Just ponder this for a moment—an ear of corn is all of the following: a flower, a collection of eggs, those eggs once grown into fruit, which are also, technically, seeds.

I will never look at a corn silk the same again; my annoyance with their presence has been replaced with awe.