How plants do it
Olivia Judson has a great piece in The New York Times today about the sex lives of plants. Plants, just like the rest of us, have, over millions of years, worked out strategies of sex and reproduction that successfully perpetuate their kind, but, as Judson points out, the plants' sex lives come with some unique obstacles. The most obvious obstacle is that the plant can't move around to find another of its kind to hook up with and so it has to depend on intermediaries. Flowers are the plants' vehicle for delivering their sperm and egg cells to the appropriate recipients and they essentially have two ways of getting those precious bits of matter to combine and make a new plant. One of their allies in reproduction is the wind. It is a bit quirky and unpredictable it is true, but about ten percent of flowering plants do use the wind to spread their pollen. Since the wind goes its own way and is a bit unreliable, wind-pollinated plants tend to produce huge quantities of pol...