Pollen is often described in everyday language as plant sperm, but this is not accurate! Pollen is not sperm (a gamete); pollen is the male gametophyte: a multicellular, haploid organism that produces the sperm.
Not even that… really. Your balls or ova are still “yours” as in your genetic material.
So we have gametes, unicellular haploid phases. But plants have gametophytes, and evolved from the gametophytic phase being the “dominant plant body” stage.
So… in analogy, in plant evolutionary history, the “big obvious plant part” literally was the sperm, and still is in bryophytes, chlorphytes, and some rhodophytes. So mosses are still this way. The big flip happened when vascular plants branched off, with the development of tracheids and plasmodesma.
So its more like… if we’re going to do metaphor imagine each “sperm” or egg being the big multicellular part we would all recognize as the “plant” and the tiny, microscopic bit, being the diploid part, would be us. So like, if there were an equivalent, it would be like if when you cum, the eggs or sperm grow up into their whole totally different looking person, which we might call a ‘cum gremlin’. This ‘cum gremlin’ then finds another ‘cum gremlin’ to have sex with. Then these cum gremlins get together to have one of you, but you are like a tiny version of yourself.
Pollen is the balls! We’re inhaling plant balls
https://organismalbio.biosci.gatech.edu/growth-and-reproduction/plant-reproduction/
Not even that… really. Your balls or ova are still “yours” as in your genetic material.
So we have gametes, unicellular haploid phases. But plants have gametophytes, and evolved from the gametophytic phase being the “dominant plant body” stage.
So… in analogy, in plant evolutionary history, the “big obvious plant part” literally was the sperm, and still is in bryophytes, chlorphytes, and some rhodophytes. So mosses are still this way. The big flip happened when vascular plants branched off, with the development of tracheids and plasmodesma.
So its more like… if we’re going to do metaphor imagine each “sperm” or egg being the big multicellular part we would all recognize as the “plant” and the tiny, microscopic bit, being the diploid part, would be us. So like, if there were an equivalent, it would be like if when you cum, the eggs or sperm grow up into their whole totally different looking person, which we might call a ‘cum gremlin’. This ‘cum gremlin’ then finds another ‘cum gremlin’ to have sex with. Then these cum gremlins get together to have one of you, but you are like a tiny version of yourself.
^help me^
This whole thread is lemmy gold
Cum gremlins