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 49 the smallest seeds DHJanzen100992.jpg high resolution
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| The other extreme of seed size for wind-dispersed seeds is held by orchids. This red Costa Rican epiphytic hummingbird-pollinated orchid has produced three fruits (green, top of image). Each of these fruits is the result of the pollination of a single flower stigma by a single packet of pollen (pollinium) from a single other flower. That is to say, whatever number of seeds it has in that fruit, they will be from a single father (in strong contrast to the parentage of the 17,000+ seeds in image DHJanzen100971.jpg above, which could have come from many different fathers, if the bees had visited many different flowers, which she probably did). | ||
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