Ann Jones

ABC Listen.

Plants are very sexual and they're being sexual all the time.

Actually, one of the things we most love about plants is the embodiment of their sexuality, and that's the flowers.

That's it.

They started it.

Plants...

They have a few ways of dividing their sexual function.

There are species that have male and female plants.

So cannabis is one of the most famous examples where you have female plants that only ever bear female flowers and male plants that only ever bear male flowers and they can only mate male to female.

On the other end of the spectrum, fully hermaphrodite plants, where each flower is capable of female and male function.

So they produce pollen, but they also accept pollen and produce seeds.

They're doing both the male thing and the female thing.

So most plants are hermaphrodites.

Plants can...

fertilise themselves between flowers on the same plant or even within the same flower, that's selfing.

There's an evolutionary imperative to avoid selfing, and there's lots of different ways to do that.

But one particularly interesting way, I think, is they can actually manipulate pollinator behaviour to avoid moving pollen within the same plant.

Tobacco plants produce many flowers per plant.

They're all flowering at the same time.

So there's opportunities to self within the same plant.