The primary reason for a plant to bear fruit is to propagate itself through its seeds. Modern, commercial strains of banana don’t have obvious seeds. Their seeds are tiny and sterile, unlike wild bananas that have large and viable seeds. Seedless, fruit-bearing plants normally propagate only with human help—as in transplanting cuttings—because the plant has no natural way to regenerate when it dies. Bananas break the mold. Each banana plant produces just one bunch of fruit over its lifetime of about a year and then dies—or at least appears to. But the stem above ground is just a portion of the plant, the so-called pseudostem. There is also an underground stem called a rhizome which produces new shoots at the base of the visible stem. These begin growing into new flowering stems just as the old one is dying. The new plant, then, really isn’t new at all and is genetically identical to its predecessor.