system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What would happen if you peeled an orange and removed a segment from it while it is still growing on a branch?
gpt
Nearly all living things have defense mechanisms for "exposed" or damaged tissue.

For humans that's anything from blood to calcified collagen.

For plants this is anything from low viscosity sap to bark.

The segment you removed would cause an upswing in activation of hardiness epigenetic activation.

This is why farmers introduce plants to cold/severe weather as slowly as possible or avoid it all together.

So youd see that section of the orange essentially create "plant scar tissue", stop growing, and only if the rest of the fruit remained viable would it continue to send nutrients.

This is also why you can still see rotten fruit on plants before they give up, they continue to try even if something went wrong until the fruit is no longer viable.

The fruit undergoes what is essentially a miscarriage and eventually detatches from the flower.