Biology · Glossary

What is Heterospory, pollen, ovule?

Definition 5.7 University Biology — Year 2 · Chapter 5 — Life Cycles and Reproduction of Land Plants

Mosses and most ferns are homosporous: one kind of spore, one kind of gametophyte bearing both sexes. Seed plants (and a few ferns and clubmosses) are heterosporous: microspores, small and many, grow into male gametophytes; megaspores, large and few, into female ones. In seed plants both are reduced to almost nothing and neither leaves the sporophyte’s tissues on its own. The male gametophyte is the pollen grain: a microspore that has divided two or three times inside its wall, carried by wind or animals to the female organ, where it grows a pollen tube and delivers its sperm — no water needed. The female gametophyte develops inside the megasporangium, which stays on the parent enclosed in one or two integuments with a pore, the micropyle: the whole structure is the ovule. After fertilisation the ovule becomes the seed: an embryo sporophyte, a store of food, and a coat made from the integuments, dormant until conditions are right.

A gymnosperm ovule in section. The female gametophyte, grown from a single megaspore inside the megasporangium, is wrapped in an integument with a pore; the pollen grain, caught at the micropyle, grows a tube to the egg. After fertilisation the whole becomes the seed.
A gymnosperm ovule in section. The female gametophyte, grown from a single megaspore inside the megasporangium, is wrapped in an integument with a pore; the pollen grain, caught at the micropyle, grows a tube to the egg. After fertilisation the whole becomes the seed.
The timetable of a pine seed: pollination in the first spring, fertilisation more than a year later, seed shed in the second autumn — about eighteen months from pollen to seed.
The timetable of a pine seed: pollination in the first spring, fertilisation more than a year later, seed shed in the second autumn — about eighteen months from pollen to seed.

Examples

Example 5.9 (Pollen in the wind)

A pine pollen grain, 50µm50\,\text{µ}\mathrm{m} across with two bladders, falls at about 3cm/s3\,\mathrm{cm}/\mathrm{s}; a large tree releases some 101110^{11} grains in a season, enough to coat ponds yellow. The chance that one grain lands on a given ovule is tiny, and the strategy works only in numbers: wind pollination is cheap per grain, costly in grains, and confined to plants that grow in stands of their own species — conifers, grasses, oaks. The flowering plants (Chapter 6) found a way to deliver pollen by animals, one grain at a time to the right address.

Example 5.11 (The groups compared)

mossesfernsconifers
dominant generationgametophytesporophytesporophyte
gametophyteleafy shoot, cmprothallus, mm, freepollen grain (4 cells); ovule contents (thousands of cells)
sporesone kindone kindmicrospores, megaspores
fertilisationsperm swim in watersperm swim in waterpollen tube
dispersal unitsporesporeseed
vascular tissuenonexylem, phloemxylem, phloem, wood
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