haha plants that can’t be easily assigned in a human made binary system – nonbinary plants

botanyshitposts:

dude as a botanist every time i learn more about plant sex i become more exasperated about the human gender and sexual binary system. only about 6% of the entire plant kingdom has individuals that are either entirely male or entirely female (called being diecious). sometimes individuals in these populations will switch their sexes between flowering just because, and we dont know why (prime example: nepenthes are diecious, and will sometimes switch their sex in captivity after blooming as one sex for years, leaving breeders flabbergasted, some having been counting on breeding them with the opposite sexed plant once they bloomed years in advance). an amazing amount of other populations have this kind of thing partitioned out among the population in the region, so individuals can be male, female, both, or neither (see: some strawberry populations). some have evolved separate sex organs (see: corn, zea maize, which has it’s male flowers in tassels on the top and its female ovaries on an organ down below. we call those individual ovaries ‘kernels’ and the fertilization tubes ‘those weird stringy things u gotta pull off when eating corn on the cob’ and that fucks me up every day of my life). the list goes on and on. that being said, im pretty sure the concept of ‘gender’ is exclusive to at most the primate clade and doesn’t include plants, but you feel it. 

in biology in general, the more you learn about sex the more you realize that we’re the weird ones.