Flower structure and pollination type sim

What the sim shows

Flower structure and pollination type: two teaching-model flowers stand on a dissecting tile. Forceps pull off their parts, outside in, onto the tile, and a half-flower drawn below shows each part as it is named. The insect-pollinated flower has sepals, large brightly coloured petals with nectaries, stamens (an anther on a filament) inside the flower, and a carpel with a sticky stigma, a style and an ovary holding ovules. The wind-pollinated grass flower has small green bracts and no petals, no nectar, large anthers hanging outside on long filaments, and feathery stigmas hanging outside. Pollen from each is measured under a microscope at ×400 with an eyepiece graticule. Graticule: 40 eyepiece divisions line up with 100 µm on the stage micrometer, so at ×400 one division = 100 µm / 40 = 2.5 µm. The field of view is 18 mm / 40 = 0.45 mm (450 µm) across. Simplified on purpose: the flowers are teaching models, not one real species: the insect-pollinated flower has 5 sepals, 5 petals, 10 stamens and one carpel with 6 ovules; real flowers vary a great deal; the grass flower is one floret, without the rest of the flower head, and its 2 bracts stand for the lemma and palea; its very short style is not named; the half-flower is drawn as if cut down the middle, so it shows only the parts the cut passes through; the forceps take each whorl off in one pull; in a real dissection each part comes off one at a time; the pollen sizes are illustrative, in a realistic range, and given as whole divisions (each grain read to the nearest division); the microscope view shows a few grains; a real slide has many more, and a wind-pollinated anther makes far more pollen; the enlarged strip is the boxed part of the view drawn 4 times larger again, so the divisions can be counted; the pollen colours and surfaces are drawn simply: insect-pollinated grains with spikes, wind-pollinated grains smooth.

• Glow: the part to name now
• Close-up: the half-flower and the microscope view (not to scale)
• Box: the part of the view drawn larger below it

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