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Birch includes animals, plants, fungi, and microbes among critical interactions with humans: [9] plants too are incredibly important determinants: for mobile hunter-gatherers, they might dictate a seasonal move; for sedentary agriculturalists, the reliability of your crop yields means the difference between survival and extinction. [9]
Plant-animal interactions are important pathways for the transfer of energy within ecosystems, where both advantageous and unfavorable interactions support ecosystem health. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Plant-animal interactions can take on important ecological functions and manifest in a variety of combinations of favorable and unfavorable associations, for ...
Thread used to sew cloth likewise comes in large part from cotton. [10] A physician preparing an elixir, from an Arabic version of Dioscorides's pharmacopoeia, 1224. Plants are a primary source of basic chemicals, both for their medicinal and physiological effects, and for the industrial synthesis of a vast array of organic chemicals. [11]
In seed plants (gymnosperms and flowering plants), the sporophyte forms most of the visible plant, and the gametophyte is very small. Flowering plants reproduce sexually using flowers, which contain male and female parts: these may be within the same (hermaphrodite) flower, on different flowers on the same plant, or on different plants.
For example, mycorrhizal fungi and rhizobia provide plants with nutrients in exchange for food, ants are recruited by ant plants to provide protection, [109] honey bees, bats and other animals pollinate flowers [110] [111] and humans and other animals [112] act as dispersal vectors to spread spores and seeds.
estimates of tropical rainforest plants with seed dispersal mutualisms with animals range at least from 70% to 93.5%. [8] In addition, mutualism is thought to have driven the evolution of much of the biological diversity we see, such as flower forms (important for pollination mutualisms) and co-evolution between groups of species.
Plants are considered domesticated when their life cycle, behavior, or appearance has been significantly altered as a result of being under artificial selection by humans for multiple generations (see the main article on domestication for more information). Thousands of distinct plant species have been domesticated throughout human history.
Plants fall into pollination syndromes that reflect the type of pollinator being attracted. These are characteristics such as: overall flower size, the depth and width of the corolla, the color (including patterns called nectar guides that are visible only in ultraviolet light), the scent, amount of nectar, composition of nectar, etc. [2] For example, birds visit red flowers with long, narrow ...