Question

Long silky hair coming out of cob of maize are
A. Meant for fruit dispersal
B. Meant for attracting insects
C. Meant for protecting seeds
D. Long style and stigma

Answer 1

Hint: Maize, also known as corn (American English), is a cereal grain first domesticated around 10,000 years ago in southern Mexico by indigenous peoples. The plant's leafy stalk produces pollen inflorescences and separate ovular inflorescences called ears that contain fruit kernels or seeds.

Complete Answer:
- Stigma maydis, the glossy, thread-like, weak fibres that develop as part of the ears of corn ( maize); the tuft or tassel of silky fibres protruding from the tip of the ear of corn, is a common name for corn silk. In modified leaves, called husks, the ear is enclosed. An elongated style, attached to an individual ovary, is each individual fibre. The word probably originated sometime between 1850 and 1855.
- Corn silk is part stigma and part style, providing a female surface of the flower to which pollen grains may stick and specifying the long path along which their genetic material must be transmitted by the pollen.
- The very tip of the corn silk, which has a greater number of hairs to make pollen stick to it, is the stigma. Kernel formation in the cob includes wind or insect pollination of the outer corn silk.
- Typically, many pollen grains adhere, but only one can participate successfully in the ovule fertilisation to form a maize kernel. The moisture of freshly emerged maize silk often attracts insects, which can cause silk clipping, which can interfere with the formation of the kernel.
- Maize is a monocot plant that, through the air, carries out its pollination.
- So it is the stigma and style of the female portion that are long, sticky and hairy as the pollen can be collected and reproduced.

The correct Answer is option (D) Long style and stigma.

Note: Corn silk produces a number of compounds that are pharmacologically active and is used as such in several forms of folk medicine, including as a diuretic and as a melanin development inhibitor.