How And Why Do Seeds Grow Inside Of Fruit?
Posted by admin on February 22, 2010
Particularly lemons.
Thanks sooo much. 10 points best answer, I promise.
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Seeds grow inside fruit (even lemons) to encourage animals to eat the fruit.
Most animals eat the whole fruit, this includes the seeds.
The seeds then go through the digestive gut of the animal, to be excreted (pooped out) somewhere.
This has a two fold, sometimes three fold benefit for the plant. First, it gets the seeds of the plant spread far and wide….a much larger range than just fruit falling from the tree. Second, it gets the seed deposited with a load of potential plant fertilizer. For some plant, the seeds MUST go through the digestive tract, and the digestive acids of an animals stomach, before they are able to sprout.
Fruit is a plants way of rewarding, and encouraging animals to come and eat the fruit, and help spread it’s seeds far and wide.
Please keep in mind you are use to modern fruit, which has a great deal more flesh (the part we humans actually eat) than most wild fruits. Most wild plants will not, and cannot expend the energy to grow that much flesh to get their seeds distributed.
~Garnet
Permaculture homesteading/farming over 20 years
Active wildlife study over 40 years
Seeds, have built-in timers inside that controls their germinating time.
These timers are either timed internally such that a seed, even when still inside a fruit, when the time has come, it will sprout inside. In other fruits, the timer is a sort of sensor that may be activated chemically or by stimuli around them, say, rise in temperature or the moisture and sunlight. This explains why in cold places, seeds could hybernate the whole winter and wait for spring to come. That is because of the temperature that activates it, even if it does not get exposed to sunlight. When a fruit rots, the seeds senses a chemical
change in its surrounding, or the chemical that inhibits it from germinating has been dissolved. A damped or moist environment usually signals to the seed that ample conditions are provided for its germination. This occurs when the fruit is rotten or when the seeds are buried underground and watered. But there are seeds that uses the fruit itself as the source of its growth during the early stages of its life, like for instance the coconut.
The lemon evolved from other plants which had the habit of growing their seed inside the fruit, and this alone explains why the lemon in particular does.
The plant in general adds to its seed food for the growing seed plus, in the case of fruits, inducements for animals to carry the seed away from the parent plant. Other plants have evolved other strategies to get their seeds distributed.
We can speculate about why the seed was covered with fruit rather than being put on the outside of the fruit. Well, very few plants have been successful in putting the seed on the outside.
Even the strawberry is not very successful in spreading seeds this way. Raspberries are similar, with a good coating of fruit around each seed they do spread enough to make this method viable if not spectacularly so.
In effect, seeds that have no fruit around them, not linked to fruit at all are among the most successful if they have a bur to carry them around, or wings, even a pod that pops open.
Fruit happens to be just one strategy that works and anything that works gets to repeat itself and be carried into other species as they evolve.
Actually, some don’t, take strawberries for example.
Seeds grow inside, because they were inside in the first place.
Ovules (eggs) are very important so they are inside the flower so that the only outsiders that can reach them are the sperms. Seeds grow from fertilized ovules, they were inside the ovary which turns into the fruit as the it grows.
if you search on internet……..
” No seed can grow with the fruit around it.”
but based on my experienced……
HOW?
when a fruit is overipened, it will start to smell bad, the skin will start to wrinkle until it will be spoil or unable to eat. The seed then react because its surroundings can hold the root then it will enable to produce offspring or young plant……
WHY?
because every seed grows, while the seed is inside the fruit, it will not react unless it cannot get any sunlight. So, it will only grow if the fruit has been cut or a little slice just to felt a little ray then it willl survive
The seeds of fruit are the offspring or baby of the fruit. They automatically grow inside the parent(fruit)