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Name: brittany
Status: student
Grade: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: N/A
Question:
Is there a relationship between seed size and fruit size?

Replies:
This depends upon the type (species) of plant, whether its fruit and seed sizes are responsive to resource availability (water, soil nutrient availability, etc.) or not. For example, using Google, and entering "correlation fruit seed size" you can find many studies reporting their results about this.

Anthony R. Brach
Missouri Botanical Garden
Harvard University Herbaria

Dear Brittany,

There is often no relationship between seed size and fruit size. If you think about the purpose of the seed and the purpose of the fruit, and how size affects each of those purposes, you can see why this is so.

Jim Tokuhisa, Ph.D.


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