did cleistogamous flowering plant undergo inbreeding? and why ?
Answers
The evolution of special flowers that never open has arisen in many different plant families. These permanently closed flowers are known as cleistogamous flowers. These are not always produced as a result of a direct environmental stress, however, and their persistence throughout so many different plant families is a bit of a puzzle to evolutionary biologists. How and why are these mixed mating systems maintained in a plant population? There must be selective advantages to both.
It has long been thought that plant populations should only stably exist as either fully opened, chasmogamous flowers, or fully closed, cleistogamous flowers. The existence of many species in which both forms exist on the same plant really threw a wrench into that hypothesis. Some examples of plants that possess such mixed mechanisms can be seen in genera such as Impatiens, Viola, and Utricularia.