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Fruit and Parent Plant
Name: Rachel
Status: other
Grade: other
Location: TX
Country: N/A
Date: 9/25/2005
Question:
I need to know when a fruit bearing tree or plant bears
fruit , if that fruit is in anyway benifical to the actual plant? In
other words, does the plant itself get anything out of bearing the fruit?
Replies:
The fruit is mostly "beneficial" to the future generations of progeny of
the plant.
Anthony Brach Ph.D.
Fruit is the plant's way of making sure its seeds are distributed.
J. Elliott
Yes! The fruit is the reproductive part of the plant. If you open a
fruit, what you find inside is seeds, right? So this is the way the plant
has plant babies. On a flower, one usually finds a pistil (the sticky stalk
in the center) and stamens (smaller stalks that surround the pistil and have
powdery pollen on them). Insects, wind, birds, etc. carry pollen from one
flower to another and dust the pistil with it. Then the base of the pistil
begins to swell, which by the way is called the ovary. Inside there will be
seeds. So when you eat a fruit, what you are eating is the swollen ovary of
a plant. YUM! Without intervention, the fruit would ripen and then rot,
releasing the seeds and allowing new plants to grow.
Van Hoeck
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Update: June 2012
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