The fig is a dark indoor hothouse for flowers, an indoor pollination chamber. And the only agents that can do the pollinating are fig wasps. The tree, then, benefits from harbouring the wasps. But what is in it for the wasps? They lay their eggs in some of the tiny flowers, which the larvae then eat. They pollinate other flowers within the same fig. ‘Defecting’, for a wasp, would mean laying eggs in too many of the flowers in a fig and pollinating too few of them. But how could a fig tree ‘retaliate’? According to Axelrod and Hamilton, ‘It turns out in many cases that if a fig wasp entering a
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