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Questions and Answers: 2017

Question: A plant can live without - one of these 1-root 2-. Shoot 3 - fruit

• Question

  A plant can live without - one of these 1-root 2-. Shoot 3 - fruit

  Answer

  Dear Prabhattiwari, a plant can live without a fruit for some period of time, but sexual species will ultimately need to produce fruits to survive through the generations. But some species of plants never produce them and do create new offspring through other mechanisms (e.g., naked seeds, spores, bulbils, rhizome fragmentation, rooting). Also, there are species of plants that lack roots (such as some thalloid members of the Araceae), but most plants do require them. There are very few hard rules of botany when it comes to what a plant can and can't live without.