Question

Maize plants are monoecious. Explain.

Answer 1

Hint: Monoecious plants have the special ability to produce sperm and egg on the same gametophyte and are largely found in bryophytes. Maize is an example of such bryophytes and is autoecious in nature.

Complete answer:
Maize that we commonly know is corn which is a monocot plant that belongs to the family Poaceae. These are monoecious in nature as they bear both sperm and eggs on the same gametophyte. These are different from dioecious plants as they have gametophytes that produce only one-either sperm or egg but never both.

Additional Information: The maize plants are almost 3meter in height but some can grow up to 13meter. It bears two types of flowers in a different part of the plant body. The male flower forms at the top of the plant whereas the female flower develops on the side and emerges from the leaf nodes.
Because of their structure, the tassel which contains hundreds of male flowers starts to develop inside the plant and emerges before it is mature and ready to shed pollen. The male flowers only have stamens and the female ones carry the only pistil. The styles are long and grow up from the ovary and out of the husks. These are very delicate therefore also known as the silk of corn. The pollen from the tassel above the female flowers lands on this stigma at the end of the silk and fertilizes the eggs later on.
As the maize or corn plants possess such specialized structure and mechanism of pollination, it is known as monoecious plants.

Note: Maize shows an autoecious type of structure that is the plants that possess both androecium and gynoecium in the same individual but in separated locations. There are other types of Monoecious plants like synoicous, paroicous, and heteroecious. Synoicous produce antheridia and archegonia in the same cluster, paroikos in separate clusters in different leaf axis, and heteroecious shows both Monoecious and dioecious depending on Environmental conditions.