Write a short essay on artificial pollination.
Answers
Imagine spending a leisurely afternoon at the park. Although you might see a few butterflies or even a couple of squirrels, honeybees don't come around as often as they used to. Honeybees are now an endangered species, on the verge of extinction. For those of us with a bee allergy, this might not seem like a bad thing. But, honeybees are crucial for pollinating plants, or helping them reproduce. This doesn't just affect the wildlife in the forest. Our crops grown for food are mostly pollinated naturally by bees. With the decline in honeybees, humans have had to devise other ways to keep our food sources alive and well.
Artificial pollination occurs when humans intervene with the natural pollination process. They carry pollen, or plant sperm, from one flower to another, allowing the pollen to fertilize the ovaries and create seeds that will develop into fruits and new plants. Artificial pollination is becoming more popular as the bee population decreases. The situation is so dire in China that 100% of some crops are artificially pollinated. Today, we're going to look at some types of artificial pollination and the risks of this process.
Answer:
pollination of crop plants is often the major requirement in achieving sufficient crop set [1, 2]. Insufficient pollination has been found to be one of the important causative factors of low yield and low quality in many fruit tree species [3]. Supplementary pollination is a valid support to increase productivity in crop species such as strawberry [4, 5], olive [6], kiwifruit [7, 8], almond [9, 10], pistachio [11, 12], hazelnut [13], macadamia [14, 15] and date palm [16, 17]. Artificial pollination leads also to increase final set, weight, kernel recovery, and, in many cases, fruit quality in terms of nutritional characteristics and shelf life [4]. Moreover, in olive tree, a greater pollination and fruiting cause a slower ripening of the drupes, and consequently harvest times are more suitable to the improvement of olive and oil quality. In many cases, natural pollination (both wind and bee) is often unsatisfactory or not constant in the years (Figure 1), because it can be affected by climatic factors, wrong synchronization of male and female flowering, and low attraction for bee since the absence of nectar in the flowers of wind-pollinated (anemophily) plants.
Explanation:
An the last 10 years, kiwifruit vine artificial pollination became a widespread practice useful to increase fruit quality. Kiwifruit size is directly proportional to the number of seeds, i.e., to the number of fertilized ovaries. However, artificial pollination efficiency depends on many parameters such as pollen quality (germinability, humidity, and conservation), pollination system (dry or liquid), coadjuvants, and flowering stage. Those parameters were well defined in Actinidia in recent studies, however, they remain quite undefined for other anemophilous pollinated trees such as olive tree, hazelnut, pistachio, and palm. In these plants, the flowers are very small and extremely numerous, so the pollination was difficult to study. In addition, there are incompatibility factors (genetic and physic), long lap time from pollination to fertilization, and alternate bearing, lower economic gain for these fruits, low agronomic input, and low innovation level in the field. All these aspects had reduced the application of pollination technique for these cultivations. The experiences developed in kiwifruit lead to define a new model crop fruit set that could be applied to anemophilous pollinated plants such as olive tree, where the fruit set are lower than 2%. The first experiences have shown a great potential and have encouraged the development of this technique.