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Among a handful of species exist hermaphrodites capable of self-fertilization.

The researchers tried to collect additional mushrooms in New Jersey and New York, where the fungus is spreading less quickly, but they didn’t find evidence of self-fertilization.

For plants such as tomatoes and peppers, that must be done by hand, a truly laborious task, especially if the flower has to have its pollen parts removed first to avoid self-fertilization.

The new move would be no surprise to Charles Darwin, who in 1876 suggested that flowers in places with few pollinators would likely engage in self-fertilization.

Modern maize breeders have systematically reduced the effects of this constant mutational pressure through artificial selection and self-fertilization, which have exposed rare recessive variants in elite inbred lines5.