Plants have many ways of reproducing. Many plants sexually reproduce by pollination of eggs with pollen to create a diploid zygote from two gametes, much like how mammals reproduce. Some plants go into haploid spore forms that can live in a life cycle on their own by mitosis that then fuse together to form a diploid that creates spores again. And some plants, even with diploid genomics, reproduce by cloning. Such plants include strawberries, quaking aspen trees, poison ivy, and spider plants. Clonal growth has many advantages over other ways of reproducing. Firstly, cloning themselves allows for daughter plants to become fully formed by remaining connected to the parent plant, sharing nutrients, water, sugars, and other vital molecules until the daughter plants can be completely independent. Secondly, with quaking aspens as an example, there are plants that do not severe the connection between the parents and daughter plants, and instead maintain connections that allow the plants to share nutrients, signal molecules, and everything in them for as long as they live. This allowed quaking aspens to be the largest single organism in the world, covering hundreds of acres and living as long as four thousand years- having thought to started growing after the most recent ice age.
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