Perhaps the most important time in the plant's life is when it has to spread its seed. Then plants have to become travellers. And the greatest travelling plant of all is this seed. It's called a sea heart and it occurs in pods like this one.
And this contains a lot of air. And that means when it falls into water... It floats. The biggest and heaviest seed of all is this one. The Coco de Mer from the Seychelles.
It can weigh up to 18 kilos. Its strategy is simply not to travel at all, but simply to fall from the parent tree, lie on the ground and bide its time. It contains so much food that it can sprout and grow slowly and wait for its parent to die and then the perfect place in the sun awaits it. The smallest of all seeds are those produced by the orchids.
A single one of those is 24 billion times lighter than the Coco de Mer and they produce them in capsules like this one. which comes from an epigendrum orchid, and that contains four million seeds. Even the slightest air currents will carry them hundreds of miles through the forest. Some are so light they don't even fall to the ground but settle on the branches high in the canopy and there found a community of plants whose roots never get to the earth.
And there's one of them right there. Music Music