3 ms·

seeds or spores are they interchangeable? I thought spores are like sperm, they are needed to produce seeds... or am I wrong?

• colechristensen 6y ago
  Not at all interchangeable. The lifecycle of ferns is a bit exotic and familiar. It's classified as alternating between two generations, the one which produces the familiar large plant, and one that produces tiny plants. It's something like "sexual reproduction with extra steps". The fern chops its genome in half and produces spores with these haploid genetics. The spores grow into tiny plants (< 1 cm) which grow leaves and roots and then produce the sperm and/or eggs (the sperm actually swims to the egg!) which fertilized, grow into a new familiar fern. In flowering plants, seeds are the result of fertilization which happens in the plant, they're bigger, contain food, and protective shells. The living cells which carry life are hidden inside. Pollen is a bit like a spore in that it's tiny and contains haploid genes, but still I'm guessing that process of reproduction is considerably more durable to increased UV.