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As in animals, female and male gametes are called, respectively, eggs and sperm. In extant land plants, either the sporophyte or the gametophyte may be reduced (heteromorphic). [2] No extant gametophytes have stomata, but they have been found on fossil species like the early Devonian Aglaophyton from the Rhynie chert. [3]
It is dioicous: male plants produce only antheridia in terminal rosettes, female plants produce only archegonia in the form of stalked capsules. [26] Seed plant gametophytes are also dioicous. However, the parent sporophyte may be monoecious, producing both male and female gametophytes or dioecious, producing gametophytes of one gender only.
Early land plants had sporophytes that produced identical spores (isosporous or homosporous) but the ancestors of the gymnosperms evolved complex heterosporous life cycles in which the spores producing male and female gametophytes were of different sizes, the female megaspores tending to be larger, and fewer in number, than the male microspores ...
In seed plants the microspores develop into pollen grains each containing a reduced, multicellular male gametophyte. [5] The megaspores, in turn, develop into reduced female gametophytes that produce egg cells that, once fertilized, develop into seeds.
In gymnosperms and angiosperms, the male gametophytes have been reduced to pollen grains, and in most of these, the antheridia have been reduced to a single generative cell within the pollen grain. During pollination , this generative cell divides and gives rise to sperm cells.
The male reproductive structures of Polytrichum juniperinum. The sporophyte of Polytrichum juniperinum. It is a dioecious plant, meaning that the male and female gametophytes are on separate plants. Juniper haircap moss have very obvious male and female parts.
Or, with bisexual and at least one of male and female flowers on the same plant. [2] Protandrous: (of dichogamous plants) having male parts of flowers developed before female parts, e.g. having flowers that function first as male and then change to female or producing pollen before the stigmas of the same plant are receptive. [6]
There are two key differences between mammalian and plant gametogenesis. First, there is no predetermined germline in plants. Male or female gametophyte-producing cells diverge from the reproductive meristem, a totipotent clump of developing cells in the adult plant that creates all the flower's features (both sexual and asexual structures).