Comment on Dandelion cannon
dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days agoalso, pollen contains the male gametes I thought - how is that not dimorphic? Plants vary in their sexual strategies, but I do think it’s fair to think of pollen as containers of semen or sperm … or at least that’s always how it’s been presented anyway 🤷♀️
burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
Yeah, the last time this was posted I had to run to wikipedia because I was fuming at my memory being wrong. I even have vague memories from biology in college about the 8-cell formation of a fertilized plant ‘egg.’ The poster was likely trying to say that many plants don’t have ‘male-only’ and ‘female-only’ types, but at the very least, fruit bearing plants/trees (angiosperms, if I remember) have two sperm-equivalents in the pollen that drill down into the pistil of the flower and find the waiting gamete. One fertilizes, one becomes the food portion that we take sustenance from.
dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
right, but when pedantically correcting the idea that pollen isn’t an example of dimorphic reproduction, making gross generalizations like that seems strangely out of place, since the whole issue they took in the first place was a (mostly true / appropriate) generalization …