NAME – Taran

CLASS – XI A
ROLL NO. – 22
SUBJECT –
BIOLOGY
TOPIC – Dispersal of seeds by
various agencies...

CONTENTS
·Acknowledgment

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·Introduction
·Presentation
·Conclusion
·Bibliography

ACKNOWLEGEMENT

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 I would like to express my
gratitude to my teacher, friends,
classmates, and parents who
motivated me and supported me
throughout this entire process of
scientific learning and discovery.

INTRODUCTION
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Seed dispersal is the way seeds get
from the parent plant to a new place.
"Dispersal" means to spread or
scatter. The basic idea is as follows.
Plants, obviously, cannot move after
they have put down roots. It follows
that it is an evolutionary advantage
to get their seeds away from the
parent plant. If the seeds take root
nearby they will compete with each
other and the parent plant. Also, a
species is more likely to survive
when its members are widely spread.
This is because local disasters still
leave plants in other places.
From the first land plants in the
Silurian period for 300 million years
to the Lower Cretaceous, virtually all
transport of spores and seeds was
done by mechanical means. In fact,
for most types of plants both
fertilisation and dispersal was done

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by wind. If not wind, then water was
the medium. A great change took
place with the appearance of
flowering plants in the Cretaceous.
Dispersal takes place mechanicallly
or through animals:
·Mechanical means:
·Spores and seeds dispersed by wind
are light, and get blown easily. An
extra step is when the spores or
seeds are blown out forcibly.
·Spores and seeds may be fired
out by force in some cases.
·Seeds and fruits dispersed by water
can float.
·Zoological means:
·Many fruits are eaten animals, and
the seeds are dropped after the fruit
is digested.

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·Some fruits are carried on the fur
of mammals.

PRESENTATION
Seed dispersal is the movement or
transport of seeds away from the parent
plant. Plants have limited mobility and
consequently rely upon a variety
of dispersal vectors to transport their
prop gules, including
both abiotic and biotic vectors. Seeds
can be dispersed away from the parent

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plant individually or collectively, as well
as dispersed in both space and time. T
There are five main modes of seed
dispersal: gravity, wind, ballistic, water
and by animals. Some plants
are serotinous and only disperse their
seeds in response to an environmental
stimulus. It can be measured using seed
traps.

Benefits of seed dispersal

Seed dispersal is likely to have several
benefits for plant species. First, seed
survival is often higher away from the
parent plant. This higher survival may
result from the actions of density-
dependent seed and seedling predators
and pathogens, which often target the
high concentrations of seeds beneath
adults.
Seed dispersal also allows plants to
reach specific habitats that are

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favourable for survival, a hypothesis
known as directed dispersal. For
example, Ocotea endresiana (Lauraceae)
is a tree species from Latin America
which is dispersed by several species of
birds, including the three-wattled
bellbird.
Finally, at another scale, seed dispersal
may allow plants to colonize vacant
habitats and even new geographic
regions.
Types of dispersal
Seed dispersal is sometimes split into
'autochory (when dispersal is attained
using the plant's own means)
and allochory (when obtained through
external means).
Autochory
Gravity
Barochory or the plant use of gravity for
dispersal is a simple means of achieving
seed dispersal. The effect of gravity on

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heavier fruits causes them to fall from
the plant when ripe. Fruits exhibiting this
type of dispersal
include apples, coconuts and passionfrui
t and those with harder shells (which
often roll away from the plant to gain
more distance). Gravity dispersal also
allows for later transmission by water or
animal.
Two other types of autochory
are ballochory (the seed is forcefully
ejected by dehiscence and squeezing)
and herpochory (the seed crawls by
means of trichomes and changes in
humidity).
Allochory
Wind

Wind dispersal of dandelion seeds

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Entada phaseoloides – Hydrochory

Wind dispersal (anemochory) is one of

the more primitive means of dispersal.
Wind dispersal can take on one of two
primary forms: seeds can float on the
breeze or alternatively, they can flutter
to the ground. The classic examples of
these dispersal mechanisms
include dandelions, which have a
feathey pappus attached to their seeds
and can be dispersed long distances,
and maples, which have winged seeds
(samara) and flutter to the ground. An
important constraint on wind dispersal is
the need for abundant seed production to
maximise the likelihood of a seed
landing in a site suitable forgermination.
Water

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Many aquatic (water) and some
terrestrial (ground) plant species
use hydrochory, or seed dispersal
through water. Seeds can travel for
extremely long distances, depending on
the specific mode of water dispersal.
The water lily is an example of such
a plant. Water lilies' flowers make
a fruit that floats in the water for a while
and then drops down to the bottom to
take root on the floor of the pond.
An special review for oceanic waters
hydrochory can be seen at oceanic
dispersal.

Showing the "bill" and seed dispersal

mechanism of Geranium pratense

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·Explosive action
Some fruits can fling (throw)
their seeds away when they are ripe.
This is a type of rapid plant movement,
where the fruit is thrown from a little
"machine".
Pea pods often use mechanical
dispersal. When the seeds are ready, the
pod dries up. When the pod dries, the
inside of the pod dries faster than the
outside. This makes the pod twist inside,
suddenly splitting open violently, rolling
into a little spiral. When this roll
happens, it makes the seeds fly out of
the pod in all directions.
Dispersal by animals
Notice the small hooks on the surface of
a bur; this enables attachment to animal
fur for dispersion.

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Epizoochory in Bidens tripartita; the
seeds have attached to the clothes of
ahuman.

Animals can disperse plant seeds in

several ways, all named zoochory. Seeds
can be transported on the outside of
vertebrate animals (mostly mammals), a
process known as epizoochory. A typical
example of an epizoochorous plant
is Trifolium angustifolium, a species
of Old World clover which adheres to
animal fur by means of
stiff hairs covering the seed. 
Seed dispersal via ingestion by
vertebrate animals (mostly birds and
mammals), or endozoochory, is the
dispersal mechanism for most tree
species. Endozoochory is generally a

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coevolved mutualistic relationship in
which a plant surrounds seeds with an
edible, nutritious fruit as a good food for
animals that consume it.
Seed dispersal by ants (myrmecochory)
is a dispersal mechanism of many shrubs
of the southern hemisphere or
understorey herbs of the northern
hemisphere. Seeds of myrmecochorous
plants have a lipid-rich attachment
called the elaiosome, which attracts
ants. Myrmecochory is a coevolved
mutualistic relationship between plants
and seed-disperser ants.
Myrmecochorous plants are most
frequent in the fynbos vegetation of the
Cape Floristic Region of South Africa,
the kwongan vegetation and other dry
habitat types of Australia, dry forests
and grasslands of the Mediterranean
region and northern temperate forests of
western Eurasia and eastern North
America, where up to 30–40% of
understorey herbs are myrmecochorous.

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Seed predators, which include many
rodents (such as squirrels) and some
birds (such as jays) may also disperse
seeds by hoarding the seeds in hidden
caches. The seeds in caches are usually
well-protected from other seed predators
and if left uneaten will grow into new
plants. In addition, rodents may also
disperse seeds via seed spitting due to
the presence of secondary
metabolites in ripe fruits. Finally, seeds
may be secondarily dispersed from seeds
deposited by primary animal dispersers.
For example, dung beetles are known to
disperse seeds from clumps of feces in
the process of collecting dung to feed
their larvae.
Dispersal by humans

 
Seed dispersal by a car.

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Dispersal by humans (anthropochory)
used to be seen as a form of dispersal by
animals. Recent research points out that
human dispersers differ from animal
dispersers by a much higher mobility
based on the technical means of human
transport. Dispersal by humans on the
one hand may act on large geographical
scales and lead to invasive species. On
the other hand, dispersal by humans also
acts on smaller, regional scales and
drives the dynamics of existing
biological populations.
Deliberate seed dispersal also occurs
as seed bombing. This has risks as
unsuitable provenance may introduce
genetically unsuitable plants to new
environments.

Oceanic dispersal is a type

of biological dispersal that occurs when
organisms transfer from one land mass
to another by way of a sea crossing.

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Biantitropical (or amphitropical)
distribution refers to the pattern
of species that exist at
comparable latitudes across
the equator but not in the tropics. For
example, a species may be found north
of the Tropic of Cancer and south of
the Tropic of Capricorn, but not in
between. This usually has to do with the
optimal temperature for the species
existing at both latitudes. How the life
forms distribute themselves to the
opposite hemisphere when they can't
normally survive in the middle depends
on the species; plants may have their
seed spread through wind, animal, or
other methods (dispersal) and then
germinate upon reaching the appropriate
climate, while sea life may be able to
travel through the tropical regions in a
larval state or by going through deep
ocean currents with much colder
temperatures than on the surface.

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Consequences of seed dispersal

Seed dispersal has many consequences

for the ecology and evolution of plants.
Dispersal is necessary for species
migrations, and in recent times dispersal
ability is an important factor in whether
or not a species transported to a new
habitat by humans will become an
invasive species. Dispersal is also
predicted to play a major role in the
origin and maintenance of species
diversity. For example, myrmecochory
increased the rate of diversification
more than twofold in plant groups in
which it has evolved because
myrmecochorous lineages contain more
than twice as many species as their non-
myrmecochorous sister groups.
Dispersal of seeds away from the parent
organism has a central role in two major
theories for how biodiversity is
maintained in natural ecosystems, the
Janzen-Connell hypothesis and

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recruitment limitation. Seed dispersal is
essential in allowing forest migrationof
flowering plants

CONCLUSION
In conclusion we find that there are
numerous ways in which seeds are
dispersed such as through agencies
like wind, animals

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ncert, Google, Wikipedia, Brittania

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