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Blogpost #7: Anthers and Stigmas, Oh My! (Grace Slone)

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There are many different parts in a flower that need to work together in order to produce a new flower. In a flowering plant, in order for it to be able to reproduce, there needs to be a sperm and an egg cell. In the case of a flower, the pollen grains contain sperm cells while the ovules inside of the ovary are the egg cells. The goal is for the sperm cell to reach the egg cell and this occurs during pollination. Through various events such as bees or butterflies drinking nectar from many flowers, to just the wind blowing pollen towards a flower of the same kind, pollination is the able to occur. Once grains of pollen reach the flower, they then grasp onto the stigma of the plant. Once on the stigma, the pollen grain sprouts a long tube into the ovary and into one of the ovules. After the ovule has been fertilized by the pollen, a new seed begins to sprout inside of the ovary. This an image of the flower itself. As seen, the major parts of flower or that are most visible are the y
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Blog post #8: A Matter of Selection (Grace Slone)

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Over many months of observing and monitoring the growth of our Brassica oleracea plant, there are many things that have become known. However, Brassica oleracea has not stayed the same for all of its existence on earth. It has changed, adapted, and gone through a process called natural selection in order to form new variations of the same species. The part of the plant that I decided to observe were the leaves of the plant. I noticed that the leaves in the various plants had a range in width from 1.5 cm to 16 cm. I also noticed that the leaves in the plants had a range in length from 6 cm to 24 cm. These two facts prove that compared to other parts of the plant, the leaves have the greatest variation and depend mostly on what type of Brassica oleracea plant it is. I think that there is so much variation in Brassica oleracea because over time, as the plants have been planted in various locations, they have needed to adapt to their new environments, an
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Blogpost #8: A Matter of Selection - Sydney Stitt

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Introduction  Natural selection seems to have affected plants for thousands - maybe millions , of years. Natural selection and adaptation allows specific traits best fit for the environment to succeed, as less-fit traits soon become extinct. Brassica oleracea , the species we're currently working on, is no exception to natural selection. Like many other species on our planet, brassica plants came from a common ancestor - wild cabbage. Yet it's been hundreds to thousands of years since adaptions from wild cabbage began - leaving plenty of room (and time) for mutations, gene shuffling (caused by meiosis) and random assortment of genetic material to create different variations and traits. The many different types of brassica plants clearly exemplify these variety of traits. As I studied the plants one day, I noticed how different these plants seemed to appear. The phenotypes of many of these plants were completely unlike one another! Some plants had spindly, purple spikes wi
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