• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

How Rare Are Four Leaved Clovers, Really?

May 16, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

What makes four leaved clovers so lucky? Perhaps it’s simply because they’re so rare – by definition, finding one is proof that you’ve been graced with a little extra good fortune for the day.

But how rare are they really? One commonly-heard statistic holds that only about one in 10,000 clovers have four leaves, making them about 500 times more rare among clovers as natural redheads are among humans. But that’s not exactly true – for a couple of reasons.

Advertisement

Firstly, the numbers are a bit more optimistic than all that. In 2017, a team of researchers working for the website Share the Luck carried out an analysis of a whopping 5.7 million clovers, finding that the likelihood of finding one four-leaf clover was actually more like one in 5,000. That’s twice as likely as the traditionally held “one in 10,000” statistic, so your chances of finding one are already looking up quite a bit.

But even then, there are more factors at play. With some types of clover – and some careful environmental planning – the chances of growing that extra leaf can be way higher.

“Breeders have selected varieties that produce as much as 50 percent of the leaves with four leaflets,” University of Delaware Botanic Gardens director John Frett told Martha Stewart. “Combined with the fact that clover spreads by underground stems, a large patch of clover can grow with an increased ability to produce greater than normal leaves with four leaflets, leading to an increased rate of discovering the elusive four-leaf clover.”

Take, for example, Suzi Mekhitarian: an Australian woman who probably couldn’t believe her good luck when, in 2014, she stumbled upon a patch of no fewer than 21 four-leaved clovers in her front yard. If her lawn were typical, the odds of that happening should have been astronomical – around one in a quinvigintillion, or 1 followed by 78 zeroes.

Advertisement

That makes it sound all but impossible – and yet, Australian Botanic Garden director of science Brett Summerell remarked at the time, “I hear about it happening every five or six years.”

Why? In general, having four leaves is a recessive trait in clover – and in plants, such traits can be even harder to pass on than in animals. “Whereas human chromosomes come in matched pairs, clovers have four copies of each chromosome per cell,” explained science and technology educator Luis Villazon in an explainer for Science Focus.

“The gene responsible for four-leaf clovers is ‘recessive’, which means that the plant will only produce four leaves if it has the four-leaf gene on all four chromosomes, which is a rare occurrence.”

In Mekhitarian’s case, though, something very unusual had happened. “Instead of the dominant gene characteristics of the plant being three leaves, it [was] four, increasing the chances of this occurring in a single patch,” Summerell explained.

Advertisement

“There hasn’t been a great deal of research into this,” he added, “so nobody knows why this occurs.”

Of course, if genetics is the key, perhaps it’s possible to make your own luck, you might think – just select for four leaves over three, the same way humans have engineered so many other species over the millennia. But even today, with gene-editing tech like CRISPR and huge advances in crop sciences, four-leaved clovers remain stubbornly elusive.

“The jury is out on why,” said Vincent Pennetti, a Graduate Research Assistant at the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, last year. While the precise genetic markers associated with growing that extra leaf have been known for over a decade, he explained, the plants themselves are more finicky than all that – if environmental conditions such as the weather or soil quality aren’t exactly right, you’ll likely end up with a bog-standard three-leafer.

“[Four leaves is] a really tough trait to do,” said Pennetti’s supervisor, UGA research professor Wayne Parrott. “If daylight or temperatures aren’t right, you won’t see it.”

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. UK PM Johnson to address lawmakers about Afghanistan on Monday
  2. Pandemic-hit Qantas weighs new pay structure to keep key executives
  3. Air New Zealand reels from Auckland curbs, Australia bubble loss
  4. Google’s Rival To ChatGPT Makes Embarrassing JWST Error That Wipes $100 Billion Off Shares

Source Link: How Rare Are Four Leaved Clovers, Really?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version