Content
Living things can reproduce in different ways. The sexual reproduction It is the one that characterizes the higher animals and some lower ones and plants. This is characterized by union of two gametes, one male and one female, that after fertilization originate an embryo.
However, among evolutionarily more primitive beings such as bacteria, yeasts, algae, fungi and some types of plants, it is common to asexual reproduction.
This means that gametes from different parents do not intervene, but there is a mechanism by which another is formed from a single individual.
Types of asexual reproduction
One of these mechanisms is bipartition or binary fission. This is typical of simple unicellular organisms, like bacteria, and implies that each cell divides in two, after duplication and division of its genetic material. There may also be multiple division.
Another possibility is the budding or budding. This is also characteristic of unicellular organisms like yeast, and what takes place is a cytoplasmic evagination, as a sprout, which after receiving the genetic material is detached from the cell that originated it.
Many plants can multiply asexually by fragmentation from cuttings, rhizomes, bulbs or stolons, to have "yolks" or growth meristems in different parts of its structure.
The sporulation it is also a very widespread asexual reproduction mechanism among living beings. This consists of the mitotic formation of special reproductive cells (spores), usually provided with resistant walls, which ensure their survival even in environments with unfavorable conditions. This mechanism is very common among algae and the mushrooms, in the latter there are sometimes special structures such as sporangia, which contain the spores.
The parthenogenesis, in which a new individual is formed from the development of unfertilized female sex cells, can be considered, in a certain way, a type of asexual reproduction.
Many living beings have a phase of asexual reproduction and another with sexual reproduction throughout their lives. What all forms of asexual reproduction have in common is that they produce genetically identical individuals to the one that originated them.
Here are some examples of life forms initiated from asexual reproduction:
- Cane cultivation sugar factory for sugar production
- Potato farming
- Bacterial colony on a Petri Dish
- Regeneration of a starfish, from one of his arms
- Reproduction of the hydra
- Onion cultivation
- Orchid cultivation
- Ornamental potus cultivation
- Ornamental cultivation of water stick
- Reproduction of protozoa
- Mushroom cultivation
- Vine growing
- Reproduction of stick insect
- Forest establishment of willows and poplars
- Establishment of air carnation over other trees
- Cactus multiplication
- Formation of algae in the ponds
- Strawberry cultivation
- Yeast colonies
- Gladiolus cultivation
