Anatomical terms of location
Standard anatomical terms of location deal unambiguously with the anatomy of animals, including humans. All vertebrates have the same basic body plan – they are bilaterally symmetrical in early embryonic stages and bilaterally symmetrical in adulthood; that is, they have mirror-image left and right halves if divided down the middle. For these reasons, the basic directional terms can be considered to be those used in vertebrates. By extension, the same terms are used for many other organisms as well. While these terms are standardized within specific fields of biology, there are unavoidable, sometimes dramatic, differences between some disciplines. For example, differences in terminology remain a problem that, to some extent, still separates the terminology of human anatomy from that used in the study of various other zoological categories. Standardized anatomical and zoological terms of location have been developed based on Latin and Greek words, to enable all biological and medical scientists to delineate and communicate information about animal bodies and their component organs though the meaning of some of the terms is context-sensitive.
The vertebrates and Craniata share a substantial heritage and common structure, so many of the same terms are used for location. To avoid ambiguities this terminology is based on the anatomy of each animal in a standard way. For humans, one type of vertebrate, anatomical terms may differ from other forms of vertebrates. For one reason, this is because humans have a different neuraxis and, unlike animals that rest on four limbs, humans are considered when describing anatomy as being in the standard anatomical position, thus what is on "top" of a human is the head, whereas the "top" of a dog may be its back, the "top" of a flounder could refer to either its left or its right side. For invertebrates, standard application of locational terminology becomes difficult or debatable at best when the differences in morphology are so radical that common concepts are not homologous and do not refer to common concepts. For example, many species are not bilaterally symmetrical. In these species, terminology depends on their type of symmetry.
Because animals can change orientation with respect to their environment, because appendages like limbs and tentacles can change position with respect to the main body, positional descriptive terms need to refer to the animal as in its standard anatomical position. All descriptions are with respect to the organism in its standard anatomical position when the organism in question has appendages in another position; this helps avoid confusion in terminology. In humans, this refers to the body in a standing position with arms at the side and palms facing forward. While the universal vertebrate terminology used in veterinary medicine would work in human medicine, the human terms are thought to be too well established to be worth changing. Many anatomical terms can be combined, either to indicate a position in two axes or to indicate the direction of a movement relative to the body. For example, "anterolateral" indicates a position, both anterior and lateral to the body axis. In radiology, an X-ray image may be said to be "anteroposterior", indicating that the beam of X-rays pass from their source to patient's anterior body wall through the body to exit through posterior body wall.
There is no definite limit to the contexts in which terms may be modified to qualify each other in such combinations. The modifier term is truncated and an "o" or an "i" is added in prefixing it to the qualified term. For example, a view of an animal from an aspect at once dorsal and lateral might be called a "dorsolateral" view. Again, in describing the morphology of an organ or habitus of an animal such as many of the Platyhelminthes, one might speak of it as "dorsiventrally" flattened as opposed to bilaterally flattened animals such as ocean sunfish. Where desirable three or more terms may be agglutinated or concatenated, as in "anteriodorsolateral"; such terms sometimes used to be hyphenated. There is however little basis for any strict rule to interfere with choice of convenience in such usage. Three basic reference planes are used to describe location; the sagittal plane is a plane parallel to the sagittal suture. All other sagittal planes are parallel to it, it is known as a "longitudinal plane".
The plane is perpendicular to the ground. The median plane or midsagittal plane is in the midline of the body, divides the body into left and right portions; this passes through the head, spinal cord, and, in many animals, the tail. The term "median plane" can refer to the midsagittal plane of other structures, such as a digit; the frontal plane or coronal plane divides the body into ventral portions. For post-embryonic humans a coronal plane is vertical and a transverse plane is horizontal, but for embryos and quadrupeds a coronal plane is horizontal and a transverse plane is vertical. A longitudinal plane is any plane perpendicular to the transverse plane; the coronal plane and the sagittal plane are examples of longitudinal planes. A transverse plane known as a cross-section, divides the body into cranial and caudal portions. In human anatomy: A transverse plane is an X-Z plane, parallel to the ground, which s
Weather
Weather is the state of the atmosphere, describing for example the degree to which it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloudy. Most weather phenomena occur in the lowest level of the atmosphere, the troposphere, just below the stratosphere. Weather refers to day-to-day temperature and precipitation activity, whereas climate is the term for the averaging of atmospheric conditions over longer periods of time; when used without qualification, "weather" is understood to mean the weather of Earth. Weather is driven by air pressure and moisture differences between one place and another; these differences can occur due to the sun's angle at any particular spot, which varies with latitude. The strong temperature contrast between polar and tropical air gives rise to the largest scale atmospheric circulations: the Hadley Cell, the Ferrel Cell, the Polar Cell, the jet stream. Weather systems in the mid-latitudes, such as extratropical cyclones, are caused by instabilities of the jet stream flow.
Because the Earth's axis is tilted relative to its orbital plane, sunlight is incident at different angles at different times of the year. On Earth's surface, temperatures range ±40 °C annually. Over thousands of years, changes in Earth's orbit can affect the amount and distribution of solar energy received by the Earth, thus influencing long-term climate and global climate change. Surface temperature differences in turn cause pressure differences. Higher altitudes are cooler than lower altitudes, as most atmospheric heating is due to contact with the Earth's surface while radiative losses to space are constant. Weather forecasting is the application of science and technology to predict the state of the atmosphere for a future time and a given location; the Earth's weather system is a chaotic system. Human attempts to control the weather have occurred throughout history, there is evidence that human activities such as agriculture and industry have modified weather patterns. Studying how the weather works on other planets has been helpful in understanding how weather works on Earth.
A famous landmark in the Solar System, Jupiter's Great Red Spot, is an anticyclonic storm known to have existed for at least 300 years. However, weather is not limited to planetary bodies. A star's corona is being lost to space, creating what is a thin atmosphere throughout the Solar System; the movement of mass ejected from the Sun is known as the solar wind. On Earth, the common weather phenomena include wind, rain, snow and dust storms. Less common events include natural disasters such as tornadoes, hurricanes and ice storms. All familiar weather phenomena occur in the troposphere. Weather does occur in the stratosphere and can affect weather lower down in the troposphere, but the exact mechanisms are poorly understood. Weather occurs due to air pressure and moisture differences between one place to another; these differences can occur due to the sun angle at any particular spot, which varies by latitude from the tropics. In other words, the farther from the tropics one lies, the lower the sun angle is, which causes those locations to be cooler due the spread of the sunlight over a greater surface.
The strong temperature contrast between polar and tropical air gives rise to the large scale atmospheric circulation cells and the jet stream. Weather systems in the mid-latitudes, such as extratropical cyclones, are caused by instabilities of the jet stream flow. Weather systems in the tropics, such as monsoons or organized thunderstorm systems, are caused by different processes; because the Earth's axis is tilted relative to its orbital plane, sunlight is incident at different angles at different times of the year. In June the Northern Hemisphere is tilted towards the sun, so at any given Northern Hemisphere latitude sunlight falls more directly on that spot than in December; this effect causes seasons. Over thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, changes in Earth's orbital parameters affect the amount and distribution of solar energy received by the Earth and influence long-term climate.. The uneven solar heating can be due to the weather itself in the form of cloudiness and precipitation.
Higher altitudes are cooler than lower altitudes, which the result of higher surface temperature and radiational heating, which produces the adiabatic lapse rate. In some situations, the temperature increases with height; this phenomenon is known as an inversion and can cause mountaintops to be warmer than the valleys below. Inversions can lead to the formation of fog and act as a cap that suppresses thunderstorm development. On local scales, temperature differences can occur because different surfaces have differing physical characteristics such as reflectivity, roughness, or moisture content. Surface temperature differences in turn cause pressure differences. A hot surface warms the air above it causing it to expand and lower the density and the resulting surface air pressure; the resulting horizontal pressure gradient moves the air from higher to lower pressure regions, creating a wind, the Earth's rotation causes deflection of this air flow due to the Coriolis effect. The simple systems thus formed can display emergent behaviour to produce more complex systems and thus other weather phenomena.
Large scale examples include the Hadley cell while a small
Animal
Animals are multicellular eukaryotic organisms that form the biological kingdom Animalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, are able to move, can reproduce sexually, grow from a hollow sphere of cells, the blastula, during embryonic development. Over 1.5 million living animal species have been described—of which around 1 million are insects—but it has been estimated there are over 7 million animal species in total. Animals range in length from 8.5 millionths of a metre to 33.6 metres and have complex interactions with each other and their environments, forming intricate food webs. The category includes humans, but in colloquial use the term animal refers only to non-human animals; the study of non-human animals is known as zoology. Most living animal species are in the Bilateria, a clade whose members have a bilaterally symmetric body plan; the Bilateria include the protostomes—in which many groups of invertebrates are found, such as nematodes and molluscs—and the deuterostomes, containing the echinoderms and chordates.
Life forms interpreted. Many modern animal phyla became established in the fossil record as marine species during the Cambrian explosion which began around 542 million years ago. 6,331 groups of genes common to all living animals have been identified. Aristotle divided animals into those with those without. Carl Linnaeus created the first hierarchical biological classification for animals in 1758 with his Systema Naturae, which Jean-Baptiste Lamarck expanded into 14 phyla by 1809. In 1874, Ernst Haeckel divided the animal kingdom into the multicellular Metazoa and the Protozoa, single-celled organisms no longer considered animals. In modern times, the biological classification of animals relies on advanced techniques, such as molecular phylogenetics, which are effective at demonstrating the evolutionary relationships between animal taxa. Humans make use of many other animal species for food, including meat and eggs. Dogs have been used in hunting, while many aquatic animals are hunted for sport.
Non-human animals have appeared in art from the earliest times and are featured in mythology and religion. The word "animal" comes from the Latin animalis, having soul or living being; the biological definition includes all members of the kingdom Animalia. In colloquial usage, as a consequence of anthropocentrism, the term animal is sometimes used nonscientifically to refer only to non-human animals. Animals have several characteristics. Animals are eukaryotic and multicellular, unlike bacteria, which are prokaryotic, unlike protists, which are eukaryotic but unicellular. Unlike plants and algae, which produce their own nutrients animals are heterotrophic, feeding on organic material and digesting it internally. With few exceptions, animals breathe oxygen and respire aerobically. All animals are motile during at least part of their life cycle, but some animals, such as sponges, corals and barnacles become sessile; the blastula is a stage in embryonic development, unique to most animals, allowing cells to be differentiated into specialised tissues and organs.
All animals are composed of cells, surrounded by a characteristic extracellular matrix composed of collagen and elastic glycoproteins. During development, the animal extracellular matrix forms a flexible framework upon which cells can move about and be reorganised, making the formation of complex structures possible; this may be calcified, forming structures such as shells and spicules. In contrast, the cells of other multicellular organisms are held in place by cell walls, so develop by progressive growth. Animal cells uniquely possess the cell junctions called tight junctions, gap junctions, desmosomes. With few exceptions—in particular, the sponges and placozoans—animal bodies are differentiated into tissues; these include muscles, which enable locomotion, nerve tissues, which transmit signals and coordinate the body. There is an internal digestive chamber with either one opening or two openings. Nearly all animals make use of some form of sexual reproduction, they produce haploid gametes by meiosis.
These fuse to form zygotes, which develop via mitosis into a hollow sphere, called a blastula. In sponges, blastula larvae swim to a new location, attach to the seabed, develop into a new sponge. In most other groups, the blastula undergoes more complicated rearrangement, it first invaginates to form a gastrula with a digestive chamber and two separate germ layers, an external ectoderm and an internal endoderm. In most cases, a third germ layer, the mesoderm develops between them; these germ layers differentiate to form tissues and organs. Repeated instances of mating with a close relative during sexual reproduction leads to inbreeding depression within a population due to the increased prevalence of harmful recessive traits. Animals have evolved numerous mechanisms for avoiding close inbreeding. In some species, such as the splendid fairywren, females benefit by mating with multiple males, thus producing more offspring of higher genetic quality; some animals are capable of asexual reproduction, which results
Pollination
Pollination is the transfer of pollen from a male part of a plant to a female part of a plant enabling fertilisation and the production of seeds, most by an animal or by wind. Pollinating agents are animals such as insects and bats. Pollination occurs within a species; when pollination occurs between species it can produce hybrid offspring in nature and in plant breeding work. In angiosperms, after the pollen grain has landed on the stigma, it develops a pollen tube which grows down the style until it reaches an ovary. Sperm cells from the pollen grain move along the pollen tube, enter an ovum cell through the micropyle and fertilise it, resulting in the production of a seed. A successful angiosperm pollen grain containing the male gametes is transported to the stigma, where it germinates and its pollen tube grows down the style to the ovary, its two gametes travel down the tube to where the gametophyte containing the female gametes are held within the carpel. One nucleus fuses with the polar bodies to produce the endosperm tissues, the other with the ovule to produce the embryo Hence the term: "double fertilization".
In gymnosperms, the ovule is not contained in a carpel, but exposed on the surface of a dedicated support organ, such as the scale of a cone, so that the penetration of carpel tissue is unnecessary. Details of the process vary according to the division of gymnosperms in question. Two main modes of fertilization are found in gymnosperms. Cycads and Ginkgo have motile sperm that swim directly to the egg inside the ovule, whereas conifers and gnetophytes have sperm that are unable to swim but are conveyed to the egg along a pollen tube; the study of pollination brings together many disciplines, such as botany, horticulture and ecology. The pollination process as an interaction between flower and pollen vector was first addressed in the 18th century by Christian Konrad Sprengel, it is important in horticulture and agriculture, because fruiting is dependent on fertilization: the result of pollination. The study of pollination by insects is known as anthecology. Pollen germination has three stages; the pollen grain is dehydrated so that its mass is reduced enabling it to be more transported from flower to flower.
Germination only takes place after rehydration, ensuring that premature germination does not take place in the anther. Hydration allows the plasma membrane of the pollen grain to reform into its normal bilayer organization providing an effective osmotic membrane. Activation involves the development of actin filaments throughout the cytoplasm of the cell, which become concentrated at the point from which the pollen tube will emerge. Hydration and activation continue. In conifers, the reproductive structures are borne on cones; the cones are either pollen cones or ovulate cones, but some species are monoecious and others dioecious. A pollen cone contains hundreds of microsporangia carried on reproductive structures called sporophylls. Spore mother cells in the microsporangia divide by meiosis to form haploid microspores that develop further by two mitotic divisions into immature male gametophytes; the four resulting cells consist of a large tube cell that forms the pollen tube, a generative cell that will produce two sperm by mitosis, two prothallial cells that degenerate.
These cells comprise a reduced microgametophyte, contained within the resistant wall of the pollen grain. The pollen grains are dispersed by the wind to the female, ovulate cone, made up of many overlapping scales, each protecting two ovules, each of which consists of a megasporangium wrapped in two layers of tissue, the integument and the cupule, that were derived from modified branches of ancestral gymnosperms; when a pollen grain lands close enough to the tip of an ovule, it is drawn in through the micropyle by means of a drop of liquid known as a pollination drop. The pollen enters a pollen chamber close to the nucellus, there it may wait for a year before it germinates and forms a pollen tube that grows through the wall of the megasporangium where fertilisation takes place. During this time, the megaspore mother cell divides by meiosis to form four haploid cells, three of which degenerate; the surviving one develops as a megaspore and divides to form an immature female gametophyte. Two or three archegonia containing an egg develop inside the gametophyte.
Meanwhile, in the spring of the second year two sperm cells are produced by mitosis of the body cell of the male gametophyte. The pollen tube elongates and pierces and grows through the megasporangium wall and delivers the sperm cells to the female gametophyte inside. Fertilisation takes place when the nucleus of one of the sperm cells enters the egg cell in the megagametophyte’s archegonium. In flowering plants, the anthers of the flower produce microspores by meiosis; these undergo mitosis to form male gametophytes. Meanwhile, the ovules produce megaspores by meiosis, further division of these form the female gametophytes, which are strongly reduced, each consisting only of a few cells, one of, the egg; when a pollen grain adheres to the stigma of a carpel it germinates, developing a pollen tube that grows through the tissues of the style, entering the ovule through the micropyle. When the tube reaches the egg sac, two sperm cells pass through it into the female gametophyte and fertil
Geometry
Geometry is a branch of mathematics concerned with questions of shape, relative position of figures, the properties of space. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is called a geometer. Geometry arose independently in a number of early cultures as a practical way for dealing with lengths and volumes. Geometry began to see elements of formal mathematical science emerging in the West as early as the 6th century BC. By the 3rd century BC, geometry was put into an axiomatic form by Euclid, whose treatment, Euclid's Elements, set a standard for many centuries to follow. Geometry arose independently in India, with texts providing rules for geometric constructions appearing as early as the 3rd century BC. Islamic scientists expanded on them during the Middle Ages. By the early 17th century, geometry had been put on a solid analytic footing by mathematicians such as René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat. Since and into modern times, geometry has expanded into non-Euclidean geometry and manifolds, describing spaces that lie beyond the normal range of human experience.
While geometry has evolved throughout the years, there are some general concepts that are more or less fundamental to geometry. These include the concepts of points, planes, surfaces and curves, as well as the more advanced notions of manifolds and topology or metric. Geometry has applications to many fields, including art, physics, as well as to other branches of mathematics. Contemporary geometry has many subfields: Euclidean geometry is geometry in its classical sense; the mandatory educational curriculum of the majority of nations includes the study of points, planes, triangles, similarity, solid figures and analytic geometry. Euclidean geometry has applications in computer science and various branches of modern mathematics. Differential geometry uses techniques of linear algebra to study problems in geometry, it has applications in physics, including in general relativity. Topology is the field concerned with the properties of geometric objects that are unchanged by continuous mappings. In practice, this means dealing with large-scale properties of spaces, such as connectedness and compactness.
Convex geometry investigates convex shapes in the Euclidean space and its more abstract analogues using techniques of real analysis. It has close connections to convex analysis and functional analysis and important applications in number theory. Algebraic geometry studies geometry through the use of multivariate polynomials and other algebraic techniques, it has applications including cryptography and string theory. Discrete geometry is concerned with questions of relative position of simple geometric objects, such as points and circles, it shares many principles with combinatorics. Computational geometry deals with algorithms and their implementations for manipulating geometrical objects. Although being a young area of geometry, it has many applications in computer vision, image processing, computer-aided design, medical imaging, etc; the earliest recorded beginnings of geometry can be traced to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 2nd millennium BC. Early geometry was a collection of empirically discovered principles concerning lengths, angles and volumes, which were developed to meet some practical need in surveying, construction and various crafts.
The earliest known texts on geometry are the Egyptian Rhind Papyrus and Moscow Papyrus, the Babylonian clay tablets such as Plimpton 322. For example, the Moscow Papyrus gives a formula for calculating the volume of a truncated pyramid, or frustum. Clay tablets demonstrate that Babylonian astronomers implemented trapezoid procedures for computing Jupiter's position and motion within time-velocity space; these geometric procedures anticipated the Oxford Calculators, including the mean speed theorem, by 14 centuries. South of Egypt the ancient Nubians established a system of geometry including early versions of sun clocks. In the 7th century BC, the Greek mathematician Thales of Miletus used geometry to solve problems such as calculating the height of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore, he is credited with the first use of deductive reasoning applied to geometry, by deriving four corollaries to Thales' Theorem. Pythagoras established the Pythagorean School, credited with the first proof of the Pythagorean theorem, though the statement of the theorem has a long history.
Eudoxus developed the method of exhaustion, which allowed the calculation of areas and volumes of curvilinear figures, as well as a theory of ratios that avoided the problem of incommensurable magnitudes, which enabled subsequent geometers to make significant advances. Around 300 BC, geometry was revolutionized by Euclid, whose Elements considered the most successful and influential textbook of all time, introduced mathematical rigor through the axiomatic method and is the earliest example of the format still used in mathematics today, that of definition, axiom and proof. Although most of the contents of the Elements were known, Euclid arranged them into a single, coherent logical framework; the Elements was known to all educated people in the West until the middle of the 20th century and its contents are still taught in geometry classes today. Archimedes of Syracuse used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, gave remarkably accurate approximations of Pi.
He studied the sp
Perianth
The perianth is the non-reproductive part of the flower, structure that forms an envelope surrounding the sexual organs, consisting of the calyx and the corolla. The term perianth is derived from the Greek περί, meaning around, άνθος, meaning flower, while perigonium is derived from gonos, meaning seed, i.e. sexual organs. In the mosses and liverworts, the perianth is the sterile tubelike tissue that surrounds the female reproductive structure. In flowering plants, the perianth may be described as being either dichlamydeous/heterochlamydeous in which the calyx and corolla are separate, or homochlamydeous, in which they are indistinguishable; when the perianth is in two whorls, it is described as biseriate. While the calyx may be green, known as sepaloid, it may be brightly coloured, is described as petaloid; when the undifferentiated tepals resemble petals, they are referred to as "petaloid", as in petaloid monocots, orders of monocots with brightly coloured tepals. Since they include Liliales, an alternative name is lilioid monocots.
The corolla and petals have a role in attracting pollinators, but this may be augmented by more specialised structures like the corona. When the corolla consists of separate tepals the term apotepalous is used, or syntepalous if the tepals are fused to one another; the petals may be united to form a tubular corolla. If either the petals or sepals are absent, the perianth can be described as being monochlamydeous. Both sepals and petals may have stomata and veins if vestigial. In some taxa, for instance some magnolias and water lilies the perianth is arranged in a spiral on nodes, rather than whorls. Flowers with spiral perianths tend to be those with undifferentiated perianths. An additional structure in some plants is the corona, a ring or set of appendages of adaxial tissue arising from the corolla or the outer edge of the stamens, it is positioned where the corolla lobes arise from the corolla tube. The pappus of Asteraceae, considered to be a modified calyx, is called a corona if it is shaped like a crown.
Simpson, Michael G.. Plant Systematics. Academic Press. ISBN 0-08-051404-9. Retrieved 12 February 2014; the dictionary definition of perianth at Wiktionary
Petal
Petals are modified leaves that surround the reproductive parts of flowers. They are brightly colored or unusually shaped to attract pollinators. Together, all of the petals of a flower are called a corolla. Petals are accompanied by another set of special leaves called sepals, that collectively form the calyx and lie just beneath the corolla; the calyx and the corolla together make up the perianth. When the petals and sepals of a flower are difficult to distinguish, they are collectively called tepals. Examples of plants in which the term tepal is appropriate include genera such as Tulipa. Conversely, genera such as Rosa and Phaseolus have well-distinguished petals; when the undifferentiated tepals resemble petals, they are referred to as "petaloid", as in petaloid monocots, orders of monocots with brightly coloured tepals. Since they include Liliales, an alternative name is lilioid monocots. Although petals are the most conspicuous parts of animal-pollinated flowers, wind-pollinated species, such as the grasses, either have small petals or lack them entirely.
The role of the corolla in plant evolution has been studied extensively since Charles Darwin postulated a theory of the origin of elongated corollae and corolla tubes. A corolla of separate tepals is apopetalous. If the petals are free from one another in the corolla, the plant is choripetalous. In the case of fused tepals, the term is syntepalous; the corolla in some plants forms a tube. Petals can differ in different species; the number of petals in a flower may hold clues to a plant's classification. For example, flowers on eudicots most have four or five petals while flowers on monocots have three or six petals, although there are many exceptions to this rule; the petal whorl or corolla may be bilaterally symmetrical. If all of the petals are identical in size and shape, the flower is said to be regular or actinomorphic. Many flowers are termed irregular or zygomorphic. In irregular flowers, other floral parts may be modified from the regular form, but the petals show the greatest deviation from radial symmetry.
Examples of zygomorphic flowers may be seen in members of the pea family. In many plants of the aster family such as the sunflower, Helianthus annuus, the circumference of the flower head is composed of ray florets; each ray floret is anatomically an individual flower with a single large petal. Florets in the centre of the disc have no or reduced petals. In some plants such as Narcissus the lower part of the petals or tepals are fused to form a floral cup above the ovary, from which the petals proper extend. Petal consists of two parts: the upper, broad part, similar to leaf blade called the blade and the lower part, similar to leaf petiole, called the claw, separated from each other at the limb. Claws are developed in petals of some flowers such as Erysimum cheiri; the inception and further development of petals shows a great variety of patterns. Petals of different species of plants vary in colour or colour pattern, both in visible light and in ultraviolet; such patterns function as guides to pollinators, are variously known as nectar guides, pollen guides, floral guides.
The genetics behind the formation of petals, in accordance with the ABC model of flower development, are that sepals, petals and carpels are modified versions of each other. It appears that the mechanisms to form petals evolved few times, rather than evolving from stamens. Pollination is an important step in the sexual reproduction of higher plants. Pollen is produced by the male organs of hermaphroditic flowers. Pollen does not move on its own and thus requires wind or animal pollinators to disperse the pollen to the stigma of the same or nearby flowers. However, pollinators are rather selective in determining the flowers; this develops competition between flowers and as a result flowers must provide incentives to appeal to pollinators. Petals play a major role in competing to attract pollinators. Henceforth pollination dispersal could occur and the survival of many species of flowers could prolong. Petals have various purposes depending on the type of plant. In general, petals operate to protect some parts of the flower and attract/repel specific pollinators.
This is where the positioning of the flower petals are located on the flower is the corolla e.g. the buttercup having shiny yellow flower petals which contain guidelines amongst the petals in aiding the pollinator towards the nectar. Pollinators have the ability to determine specific flowers. Using incentives flowers draw pollinators and set up a mutual relation between each other in which case the pollinators will remember to always guard and pollinate these flowers; the petals could produce different scents to allure desirable pollinators or repel undesirable pollinators. Some flowers will mimic the scents produced by materials such as decaying meat, to attract pollinators to them. Various colour traits are used by different petals that could attract pollinators that have poor smelling abilities, or that only come out at certain parts of the day; some flowers are able to change the colour
