DisneyNature, Wings of Life: Butterflies, Bees; & Flowers To Fruit

Did You Know That Some Plants Have Ovaries?

Flowering plants are a type of plant that produce flowers in order to reproduce. Flowering plants produce seeds within a fruit. The scientific name for flowering plants is angiosperms.

Flowering plants are usually bisexual, with the flower having a male part and a female part.

The stamens in the middle of a flower, surrounded by the green supporting sepals and by the beautiful coloured petals, are the male part of the flower. Each stamen is made up of a filament or thin structure that is tipped at the top by the anther.

Pollen is a fine to coarse powdery substance comprising pollen grains which are male microgametophytes of seed plants, which produce male gametes (sperm cells)

The anther connects to the filament with lobes which holds sacs containing pollen.

The female part of the flower, the pistil, consists of a long slender tube, called the style, with the stigma at the top, which leads down to the rounded base which is the ovule-filled ovary, or carpel.

Flowering plants rely on wind or winged and other creatures for pollination, i.e. for carrying pollen from the anthers to the stigma of a flower. Having both male and female parts within the same flower makes it handy for a plant — an insect, bird, or moth can easily pick up and deposit pollen on the same flower or a different flower of the same plant, in the same visit.

Many flowers can be pollinated by their own pollen — a process called self-pollination. However, this does not always result in the genetic variation needed for species to survive.

Many plants have ways to make sure they are only pollinated by pollen from a flower on a different plant, which is called cross-pollination. Some have the male and female parts in separate flowers on the same plant, while others have male and female flowers on different plants. Many have the stigmas and anthers ripening at different times to prevent self-pollination.

Examples of hybrid cross-pollinated flowering plants are evening primrose, iris and cowslip.

Outcrossing, cross-fertilization or allogamy, in which offspring are formed by the fusion of the gametes of two different plants, is the most common mode of reproduction among about 55% of higher plant species.

DisneyNature, an independent film company of Disney, has broadcast nature movies since 2007. To date, they have produced 13 films, and I have just watched “Wings Of Life” which was first broadcast in 2011.

It is 81 minutes in duration and is beautifully narrated by Meryl Streep.

I love this documentary and highly recommend anyone watching it, in order to remind themselves and others of the wonders of nature; and how our fruits are produced, and of the balance between bees, bats, birds and pollinators of flowers.

One of my two favourite parts was when the film showed, sped up in time, the beautiful yellow flower of a tomato plant pushing out the new-born tomato. The petals withered and fell off, leaving the baby tomato.

The seed is a small embryonic plant encased in a seed coat, with the cotyledons providing food absorption and/or a food store for the embryo. When the sperm from the pollen reaches an ovule in the ovary, fertilization occurs, creating the seed.

The cotyledons are the the embryonic leaves (with one for a monocot and two for a dicot), the endosperm provides nutrition to the seedling, the hypocotyl is the embryonic stem, and the radicle is the embryonic root.

The hilium is like the umbilical cord — it is a scar or mark of attachment of the ovule or seed to the ovary wall. The micropyle is a small opening in the integument (outer layer) of the ovule through which sperm are able to access the ovum (egg or female gamete).

When a grain of pollen reaches the stigma, it creates a pollen tube for the sperm to journey down the style and fertilize the ovule. Fertilization is the death of the flower, as the petals drop or wither at this point and the ovary starts to enlarge and ripen into what we know as fruit, which protects the seeds.

When you see the flower give way to the fruit, it nourishes your inner senses of natural order and awakens your appreciation of flowering plants

The website below explains the multi-tasking of the tomato plant very well.

Although all flowers, if fertilized, transform into fruits, not all fruits are edible. The fruit of the potato plant is quite poisonous, and should not be eaten. Cotton bolls are dry fruits from which we harvest cotton fibres.

The other momentous experience for me was watching the small pregnant Lesser long-nosed bats, after flying 40 miles, to feed on the nectar and fruits of the huge Cardon cactus plants in the Sonoran Desert in North America.

Each spring, flowers begin to develop on the upper portion of the multiple stems. The flowers open in late afternoon, remain open during the night and close by noon of the next day. They produce a large quantity of nectar, which has an odor that is most attractive to bats.

The golf ball-size, spiny fruits slowly develop, becoming ripe in late summer. Each fruit will contain upwards of 1,000 black seeds. The ripened fruits and seeds provide a much needed source of food for other desert mammals and birds in this arid region.

The bats’ bodies become covered with pollen which is transferred between flowers, as they feed throughout the night. The pollinated flowers produce fruit, and the seeds ingested in the summer by the bats, are excreted, to give rise to new cactus plants. 😃

The other major enchanting story of this film was the migration of the eastern and north-eastern Monarch Butterflies, in the fall, from Southern Canada and the U.S.A. to the high mountains in central Mexico.

There they keep close together for warmth, until they return to warmer climes such as Texas, where they mate and lay eggs on milk-weed plants in the mid-western regions of the U.S.A. and make their way back to Southern Canada and Eastern North America.

Only some milk-weed plants are the “host plants” for the larvae or caterpillars of these beautiful brightly coloured butterflies. These plants cause the caterpillars and the butterflies to be toxic to many would-be predators.

As adults, monarch butterflies visit countless numbers of wildflowers each year as they seek out nutrient-rich nectar. In doing so, the monarchs transfer pollen from one plant to another and assist in those species’ reproduction.

This is a really wonderful documentary with beautiful scenery and smart use of time-lapse photography, and includes segments with fights between hummingbirds, and animals capturing and devouring others, which small children may not like. Just fast-forward this part, if you like.

The time-lapse photography of the transformation from chrysalis to butterfly is truly amazing and unforgettable.

“Wings Of Life” also beautifully narrates the importance of the bees in pollinating flowers.

Orchids utilize a variety of intricate strategies for attracting the many specific pollinators on which their survival depends.

The lip of the Bucket Orchid flower forms a bucket filled with a sweet-scented viscous liquid. The surface of the flower is slippery, and occasionally a bee loses his footing and falls into the bucket.

The only way to escape and avoid drowning is through a narrow opening at the base of the lip. As the bee squeezes his way through, his back scrapes against the column of the flower and two sacs of pollen are deposited on his back.

After drying himself and flying off, the bee will often visit another flower and repeat the process, this time depositing the pollen on the stigma (female part) of the flower.

The film showed this actual footage, which was amazing.

The IMDb site states:

WINGS OF LIFE launches into the stories of selected animal characters — a bat, a hummingbird, a butterfly, and a bee — stories that reveal the extraordinary importance of flowers and their pollinator partners. Though we primarily associate flowers with beauty, we often don’t realize how essential they truly are — that without flowing plants and their winged carriers, and the foods they produce, we humans might not survive. Using special cinematic techniques, Wings of Life explores the mystical intersection of the animal and plant worlds where life regenerates itself over and over again.

This sums up what you learn from watching this documentary. According to Fruitsinfo there are 2,000 different types of fruits around the world. If you want to know what the flower for a particular fruiting plant looks like, just “google” something like AVOCADO FLOWER where you replace “avocado” with whatever fruit you like.

It will be a great world where kids and adults alike know how fruits are produced, and appreciate that milk comes from cows not from the fridge!

Botanically speaking, a fruit is a seed-bearing structure that develops from the ovary of a flowering plant, whereas vegetables are all other plant parts, such as roots, leaves and stems. This means that lots of “vegetables” are also fruits: beans, peppers, pumpkins, peas, and of course, tomatoes.

References

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