Thursday, November 29, 2012

Do plants have blood?

Plants don't have blood, at least not in the same way that vertebrate animals do.


Blood is a specific element of the circulatory system, so it would probably be more informative to start with a more generalized question like "Do plants have a circulatory system?" If you consider a circulatory system to be something that allows the plant to move nutrients and wastes across a large portion of the organism, then, yes, you could consider vascular plants to have a sort of circulatory system. However, plants don't have specialized cells dedicated to transport in the same way that our blood does, and their circulatory systems are relatively low-pressure and powered more by solvent effects than by direct force like vessel constriction or a heart.


The primary purpose of our blood is to be able to move oxygen and carbon dioxide around our bodies efficiently. Plants don't need to do this because they absorb and release carbon dioxide almost directly from each individual photosynthesizing cell. Therefore we can say that plants have neither a literal nor an analogous version of blood, as we typically define it.

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