Plant sex

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Minus bad pickup lines, one-night stands, and other social complexities, plants actually do have sex. Most plants sprout bisexual flowers which have both male and female parts , but plants like squash grow separate male and female flowers — still others have both bisexual and single-sex flowers. And, as evolutionary biologists have recently discovered, plants with male and bisexual flowers produce more seeds. So how do flowering plants do it? Using nature as a matchmaker, wind, animals, or water carry pollen to a sticky female stigma.

Plant reproduction is the production of new offspring in plants , which can be accomplished by sexual or asexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction produces offspring by the fusion of gametes , resulting in offspring genetically different from the parent or parents. Asexual reproduction produces new individuals without the fusion of gametes, genetically identical to the parent plants and each other, except when mutations occur. In asexual reproduction male and female gametes do not fuse, as they do in sexual reproduction.

Plant reproductive morphology is the study of the physical form and structure the morphology of those parts of plants directly or indirectly concerned with sexual reproduction. Among all living organisms, flowers , which are the reproductive structures of angiosperms , are the most varied physically and show a correspondingly great diversity in methods of reproduction. The breeding system, or how the sperm from one plant fertilizes the ovum of another, depends on the reproductive morphology, and is the single most important determinant of the genetic structure of nonclonal plant populations. Christian Konrad Sprengel studied the reproduction of flowering plants and for the first time it was understood that the pollination process involved both biotic and abiotic interactions.