Flower Dissection Lab

Flower Structure:

This is the stamen of the flower. The top, brown part is called the anther, which produces pollen. The green stem-like thing that is attached to the anther is called a filament. The anther and filament are both male flower parts.

These are the petals of the flower I dissected. Petals are neither male nor female. They are just petals.

The brown part on the top of this stem-like thing in this photo is called a stigma. The stem-like thing is called a style.

This is the ovary of the flower (bottom part). Together the stigma, style, and the ovary make up the female part of the flower called the pistil.

The Ovary:

When I cut the ovary in half and looked at it under a dissecting microscope, I actually saw the ovules. They looked like small, green balls, kind of like peas.

Pollen:

This is the pollen of my flower under a microscope. They look like tiny little seeds. They kind of look like shells with something in them.

Pollination:

Pollination is the transfer of pollen from the anthers of a plant, to the stigma of a plant. This is required to happen if the plant wants to reproduce. The structures that are involved in pollination are the anthers, which make the pollen in the first place, and the stigma, which has a sticky substance on it that helps the pollen to stick onto it. There are two different types of pollination: self-pollination and cross-pollination. Self-pollination occurs when pollen is transferred from an anther of a flower, to its own stigma. The benefit of this is that it is easy for a plant to reproduce (using this technique) if there is a lack of pollinators to spread the pollen to other plants. Cross-pollination is when the pollen from one plant is transferred to the stigma of another plant. The benefit of this technique is that there is more diversity in a species of a plant. There will be more beneficial genes in a species of a plant. This is good because there is a smaller chance for the species to go extinct, if it gets infected by a disease.

Angiosperm Classification:

The flower that I dissected in the lab today was a monocot plant. Here is proof:

Monocots have floral parts (petals) that occur in 3's, or multiples of 3. The plant I dissected had six petals, which is a multiple of three, so it is a monocot.

Monocots have leaves with parallel veins. This is a leaf from my flower. As you can see, it has veins running parallel to each other.