yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Plant reproductive success | Organism growth and reproduction | Middle school biology | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

  • [Instructor] We've already talked about reproductive success in other videos. It's related to the number of offspring an organism can have in its lifetime. And so in this video, we're going to think about strategies that plants will use for reproductive success.

A plant that has more surviving offspring has a higher reproductive success. So one major strategy that plants use to increase their chances of reproduction is by leveraging animals for pollination. You have seen pollination. This is a picture of a bee gathering nectar from this flower, but as it gathers that nectar, pollen also gets attached to that bee.

So as that bee goes from flower to flower, from plant to plant, it's able to pollinate; it's able to take pollen from one plant and give it to another plant, allowing for that genetic mixing to occur and also to then have more plant reproduction. Now, once a plant is able to reproduce, we also need to think about how viable its offspring are going to be. Are they in conditions where they are likely to succeed in living and then reproducing themselves?

And here, a common strategy, or at least a category of strategies that plants use, are known as seed dispersal. And it's really just trying to get the seeds in as many places as possible, potentially far away from the plant itself, to increase the chances that more of the seeds are going to be in places that are nutrient-rich, where they can survive.

And once again, you have likely seen this. This is a dandelion plant, and when a strong wind blows, these dandelion seeds catch the wind because they have these structures which are not that aerodynamic, which pull the seeds along and can transport them for even miles and miles. Many of these seeds aren't going to end up in useful places, but some of them might, and they might be in places where the future dandelion offspring are more likely to survive and then reproduce themselves.

But seed dispersal also gets the help of animals. This right over here is a picture of a bird eating fruit from a plant. And as that bird flies away and munches on that fruit, that seed might be dispersed; it might be thrown down hundreds of yards or even miles away from the original plant.

In many cases, you might eat a fruit, and I am saying you because we do this ourselves. You might eat, say, a watermelon or a papaya, and a couple of seeds go down while you ate it. And then later on, you or some other animal might poop it someplace where it might be a good place for that watermelon plant or that papaya plant to grow.

So this was just an overview of some of the strategies that plants use, but it's important to realize that throughout nature, we see this idea of reproductive success over and over again, and in animals' behaviors or strategies for reproductive success. And here we saw plants' strategies for reproductive success.

More Articles

View All
Multiplying using area models and the standard algorithm
What we’re going to do in this video is multiply the numbers 352 and 481, and we’re gonna do it in two different ways. But realize that the underlying ideas are the same. So first, let’s just appreciate that 352 can be rewritten as 300 plus 50 plus 2, or…
WORLD’S MOST AMAZING ARCHER in Slow Motion - Smarter Every Day 130
Hey it’s me Destin, welcome back to Smarter Every Day. I know when you think about archery you think about Nottingham, and one guy in particular, Robin Hood. But I’m gonna tell you about a guy today in my home town that might even be better than Robin Hoo…
Different mediums and the tone of the text | Reading | Khan Academy
Hello readers. I would like to show you one of my favorite things I ever wrote. It’s this splash page from a comic I wrote some years ago, illustrated by my friend Core Biladu. You’ll notice it has almost no words in it, at least in this form. Now, let m…
Examples dividing by tenths and hundredths
Welcome! So let’s see if we can figure out what 8 divided by 0.4 is. Pause this video and see if you can work through that. All right, so we’re trying to figure out what eight ones divided by four tenths is. One way to think about that is to think about…
Using related volumes | Solid geometry | High school geometry | Khan Academy
[Instructor] We’re told that all of the following figures have the same height. All of the figures except for B have square bases. So that’s a square base, that’s a square, that’s a square, and that’s a square. All of the figures except for C are prisms. …
Dividing fractions and whole number word problems
We are told that Billy has one fourth of a pound of trail mix. He wants to share it equally between himself and his brother. How much trail mix would they each get? So pause this video and try to figure that out. All right, now let’s work through this to…