How do plants reproduce

For example, they can study the shape differences between male flowers and female flowers. You can do this too! Unlike humans, plants cannot move around. This means that plants need to use other strategies to move pollen to ovules to make seeds. For outcrossers, the male plants do not need to spend their energy making seeds, so they can spend more energy on making and dispersing high-quality pollen. Similarly, since female plants do not need to make pollen, they can spend more energy on making high-quality ovules.

This means that they can pass on more resources to their offspring to improve their chances of survival. Furthermore, because dioecious plants need two different plants to reproduce, the offspring will have more variety in the genes they get from the parents. This is especially important if the environment changes, because the offspring with greater variety in their genes will be more likely to have genes that help them adapt to a new environment.

On the other hand, selfers, whose offspring only have genes from their one parent, would have less variety in their genes and might have more trouble adapting to environmental changes. This is a pretty great advantage for outcrossers! Can you think of any reasons why outcrossing might not be the best strategy for a plant to reproduce? Scientists have a couple ideas why outcrossers may not be as common as selfers. First, since male and female outcrossers need similar environments and resources to survive, they would need to compete with each other if they are too close together.

Thirty-one percent of dioecious plants avoid the issue of competition by relying on the wind to carry pollen to the female plants. While the plants are no longer competing for resources when they use the wind for pollination, the males then need to make much more pollen in order to increase the chances that their pollen reaches the distant female ovules.

You can think of this like shooting basketballs into a hoop Figure 3B. Being a selfer is a lot like shooting basketballs from right under the basketball hoop. Being a dioecious plant is like shooting basketballs at the hoop from half court: you need a lot more basketballs to increase your chances of making it in the hoop.

The second reason outcrossers might not be as common as selfers is that neither the males nor females can make offspring without the other. If all of the males or all of the females were to die, then the plant species would go extinct. Selfers do not need to worry about this issue because they are not dependent on other plants to make more seeds.

Farmers are very important to us because they grow the food that we need to survive. Scientists can share what they learn about plants with farmers so they can grow more food, or do so more efficiently. Let us say you are a farmer and you want to grow kiwi vines, which you now know are dioecious. As a farmer, you need to grow male kiwi trees, which do not make kiwifruit but are needed to make pollen for the female kiwi trees.

You can ask scientists what is the fewest number of male kiwi vines that would be needed to pollinate the female vines so you do not waste extra resources like land and water to grow unnecessary male vines.

Furthermore, as a kiwi farmer, you know that you need to grow your vines for multiple years before they start producing fruit. When a kiwi vine is young, it is hard to tell if it male or female. You can ask scientists to look at the DNA of your young kiwi vines to help you figure out which ones are male. You can use this information to make sure the male plants are spread out on your farm, and that there are not too many male vines. Now that you have learned more about how plant reproduction works, you may look at plants in a different way.

Next time you see a flower, maybe you will want to take a closer look. Can you tell if it has male parts or female parts or both? Next time you see a plant that we mentioned in this article, maybe you will let your family and friends know about it.

Selfers include both monoecious and hermaphroditic plants. Sometimes outcrossers have male and female reproductive organs on the same plant, but they still need to be fertilized by a separate plant.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. One hundred ways to invent the sexes: theoretical and observed paths to dioecy in plants. The process of fragmentation can partly turn into asexual reproduction if some of the fragments formed further reproduce by sexual reproduction.

Angiosperms mostly reproduce by the mode of sexual reproduction. A flower is a reproductive organ in angiosperms.

A flower may male or female or both the reproductive organs. Flowers carry out the process of sexual reproduction in plants by bringing about the fusion of male and female gametes to produce the seeds which bear the fruit. The seeds germinate and develop into new individual plants.

Thus, in the sexual mode of reproduction, new plants are produced through the fusion of female and male gametes which produces an embryo. This fusion of gametes leads to the production of seed.

These seeds would bear the new plant on germination in the future. The flower can either be bisexual- housing both the male and female organs or unisexual, wherein male and female organs are located in different flowers. Pistil id the female reproductive organ and the stamen is the male reproductive organ in the flower. Pollination is the type of reproduction that takes place by the transfer of pollen grains.

Pollen grains are male microgametophytes that produce the male gametes. So, pollen grains need to be transferred to the stigma of the flower through the anthers. The stigma contains the ovule or the female gametophyte which when fuses with the pollen grains or the male gametophyte produces the zygote. Pollination can be either self-pollination which occurs within the same flower or different flowers of the same plant or cross-pollination which takes -place among flowers of different plants of the same species.

After the transfer of pollen grains, male and female gametes fuse to form the zygote at the ovary of the pistil of the flower.

The zygote thus formed by the fusion of gametes develops into an embryo. The carpels of the flower develop into the fruit tissue.

The ovary develops into the fruit and the ovules within bear the seeds of the flower. Sexual reproduction in plants often requires carriers or vectors for the transfer of pollen grains. These could be biotic or abiotic vectors. The biotic vectors of pollination are bees, insects, birds, etc.