Pollination Process

Have you ever thought about why bees are drawn to flowers? Blooms are attractive and fragrant, but there is a reason for this: flowers assist plants in reproduction. Flowering plants produce seeds, which carry the parents’ genetic information and develop into a new plant.

Pollination 

Pollination is the process of extracting pollen grains from the male component of a flower, the anther, and transferring them to the female part of the flower, the stigma. Pollen grains must be transported from the same species of flower for pollination to be successful. 

Process Of Pollination

  • When flowers bloom, a natural process called pollination takes place.

  • When pollen grains from the respective flowers land on the stigma, they form a pollen tube the length of the style that connects the stigma and the ovary. After the pollen tube is formed, the pollen grain begins carrying sperm cells from the grain to the ovary.

  • The fertilisation process in plants will begin later when the sperm cells reach the ovary and egg cells. The seed is then liberated from the parent plant via pollination, allowing it to grow into a plant and continue the reproductive cycle.

Methods of Pollination 

For reproduction, all flower-bearing plants rely entirely on pollination. Pollination can be divided into two categories: natural pollination and artificial pollination.

1. Self-Pollination

2. Cross-Pollination

Self Pollination

As only one flower is involved, it is referred to as primary pollination. Pollen grains fall directly from the anther into the stigma of the flower, resulting in self-pollination. Because the flower’s sperm and egg cells share some genetic information, this procedure is simple and quick, resulting in a decrease in genetic variety.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Self  Pollination

  1. Recessive characters are deleted through self-pollination.

  2. When compared to cross-pollination, pollen grain waste is little.

  3. As there is no genetic variation in the process of self-pollination, the race’s purity is preserved.

  4. External forces such as wind, water, and other pollinating agents are not involved in self-pollination.

  5. Self-pollination ensures that even a tiny amount of pollen grains produced by plants has a high rate of pollination success.

Disadvantages

The main disadvantage of self-pollination is that genes do not mix. As a  result:

  1. The race’s vigour and vitality are dwindling.

  2. The offspring’s immunity to illnesses is lowered as a result.

Cross-Pollination

It’s a complicated method of pollination that allows pollen grains to be transferred from one flower’s anther to the stigma of another. As various flowers share and integrate their genetic information to make unique offspring, this strategy increases genetic variety.

Types of Cross-Pollination 

Cross-pollination involves the assistance of biotic and abiotic pollinators such as animals, birds, wind, insects, water, and other agents.

  1. Pollination by wind (Anemophily)

Wind pollination is used by only a few flowers, and their blossoms are greenish, tiny, and odourless. These flowers’ energy isn’t used to make colourful petals because they don’t attract pollinators. When plants lack nectar-producing flowers and other distinguishing characteristics, such as inconspicuousness, this sort of pollination happens. The male portions of Anemophilous flowers release a lot of pollen, while the stigma, which is the female reproductive element of the flower, is very big, sticky, and feathery, extending fully beyond the bloom. As a result, pollen has a better chance of reaching them.

Wind-pollinated plants include coconuts, palms, maize, grasses, and all gymnosperms.

In the spring, you may have noticed that your car is completely covered in a yellow film; this is the pollen that uses the wind to pollinate.

  1. Pollination by animals – Zoophily

Plant reproduction is heavily influenced by animals. They aid in the spreading of seeds. When an animal consumes a plant’s fruit, it migrates to a new area. This movement aids in the distribution of seeds, resulting in the establishment of new plants in new sites.

  1. Artificial Pollination-Anthripholly

Humans are responsible for artificial pollination. Anthropophily is another name for this process. If abiotic or biotic agents fail to pollinate female flowers, the artificial method of pollination is used, which involves dispersing pollen grains over the female flowers. In this process, hybridization techniques are also applied. 

Cross- pollination’s  Advantages and Drawbacks

  1. The strength and viability of the seeds produced are excellent.

  2. Cross-pollination is a procedure that allows all unisexual plants to reproduce.

  3. As a result of genetic recombination, the recessive traits in the lineage are lost.

  4. This mechanism increases the offspring’s resistance to illnesses and other environmental variables.

  5. Cross-pollination results in the introduction of new genes into a species’ sequence, owing to fertilisation between genetically different gametes.

Disadvantages

  1. There is a significant amount of pollen grain waste during this process.

  2. As we know  DNA recombination during meiosis, there’s a potential that excellent attributes could be lost and bad traits would be added to kids.

Conclusion 

We conclude that it is a necessary ecological function for survival. The human race and all of Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems would perish if pollinators were not there. Nearly 80 percent of the 1,400 crop plants farmed around the world, i.e. those that provide all of our food and plant-based industrial products, require animal pollination.

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