Every banana you've ever bitten into probably tasted almost identical, and that's not a coincidence.
That's because almost every banana sold today is a genetic clone, cut from the exact same original plant.
Bananas grown for supermarkets don't actually come from seeds; farmers replant cuttings from existing plants instead.
The variety behind nearly all exports, called the Cavendish, is essentially one single plant copied billions of times over.
That uniformity makes it dangerously fragile, since one disease can wipe out entire plantations at once with nothing stopping it.
It's already happened before: the world's favorite banana in the 1950s, the Gros Michel, was driven to near extinction by a fungus.
Today's Cavendish faces that same fungal enemy, known as Tropical Race 4, and scientists warn it could disappear the very same way.
