Sexual reproduction is a way of making a new individual by joining two special sex cells, called gametes. In the sexual reproduction of animals and plants, the male and female gametes join to ...
The flowers and fruit of flowering plants come and go as part of their life cycle. Some flowering plants don’t even have stems and leaves all the time. The fruit and vegetables we eat come from ...
Flowering plants need to get pollen from one flower to another, either within a plant for self-pollination or between plants of the same species for cross-pollination to occur. However, pollen ...
Dr Mark Goodwin of Plant & Food Research explains how flowering plants use self-pollination or cross-pollination in their reproduction. He uses kiwifruit and avocado as examples to show how ...
It doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t eat, it doesn’t excrete, and it doesn’t grow – so it can’t be alive, can it? It hijacks a living cell and uses it to produce so many copies of itself that it bursts ...
Most flowers have the same basic parts, even though they come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and colours. Flowers are there to make sure that pollination and fertilisation take place, so that ...
Cold seeps are places on the seafloor where cold hydrocarbon-rich water escapes. They occur most often at tectonic plate boundaries. Carbonate deposits and communities of organisms are often ...
Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are the most important pollinators of many cultivated food crops and other flowering plants. These plants would be in trouble without bees, and so would we. Flowers ...
In this activity, students take on the role of flower parts and act out the process of insect pollination By the end of this activity, students should be able to: understand that pollination ...
Our native forests – ngahere – have complex ecosystems. Within the wider ecosystems are smaller ecosystems, such as the one formed around honeydew. Honeydew is a sweet, sticky substance produced ...
Dr Wendy Williamson of ESR’s water management team explains that viruses are extremely small infectious particles that need to infect cells in order to replicate themselves. Viruses infect every ...
Flowers are a common sight in most New Zealand school grounds. They offer a colourful starting point to teach about plant reproduction and adaptation and offer opportunities to extend into ...
Dave Kelly of the University of Canterbury explains abiotic pollination by wind and biotic pollination by animals. He shows the characteristics of bird-pollinated flowers and the birds that carry ...
In this activity, students match native flowers with their pollinators, basing predictions on the main characteristics of flowers pollinated by wind, insects or birds. By the end of this ...
Birdlife has been declining in the New Zealand bush for many years, mainly due to introduced predators such as rats and stoats. Professor Dave Kelly and Jenny Ladley of the University of ...
This interactive groups Hub resources into key science and technology concepts. The article Pollination resources provides pedagogical advice and links to the New Zealand Curriculum.
Watch varroa mites (white juveniles and brown adults) on honey bees and learn how they spread viruses that kill bee colonies. Dr Mark Goodwin of Plant & Food Research shows hives being ...
In this activity, students read about pollination using a three-level reading guide and use their ability to locate information to interpret the scientific information. Students apply their ...
In some of the beech forests of New Zealand, bright red or yellow mistletoe flowers stand out in the summer. The colour attracts native birds, which drink the nectar and pollinate the flowers at ...
Learn about the role of flowers in the life cycles of flowering plants. Discover how flowers ensure the transfer of pollen, and meet some of the unsuspecting animal pollinators. This resource ...
Ryegrass is an important food for cattle, but it is also a favourite food of competing insects. Can biological control offer a solution? What's so special about ryegrass? Ryegrass is an important ...
Sci-fi writers from Arthur Conan Doyle to Ray Bradbury have long speculated about the invisible lighter-than-air creatures that must surely inhabit the realms above the ground. After all, just ...
ESR scientist Dr Brent Gilpin explains that a bacteriophage, or phage, is a virus that infects bacteria. He describes how a phage can be easily detected in the lab by plating bacteria on an agar ...
Ruminants like cows have an amazing digestive system. They are able to digest cellulose found in plant material – something humans cannot do. Drag and drop the text labels onto the boxes next to ...
