If cats have kittens... Trivia Quiz

Answer: spores

Mushrooms are fungi and shed their spores from between the gills on the underside of the cap, in a brown powder. With mushrooms, you sometimes see this in the paper bag you have bought them in. They are so light and tiny that even the gentlest breeze will cause them to drift to new places.

Answer: Animals, including humans, carry them away

Cleavers seeds have many little hooks, a bit like velcro, which cling to clothes and fur and are carried far and wide until they are groomed away or until the hooks become desiccated and drop off.

Answer: In the waters that flow over the coral reefs

Corals eject clouds of eggs and sperm which drift together in the tides and currents. The phases of the moon seem to dictate that all the corals eject them at the same time, causing a phenomenon that divers like to watch.

Answer: To propagate it in a new situation

Moss does not usually need to propagate itself. No one seems able to say for certain how most mosses start to grow in a new place in the wild. It has neither roots nor seeds, but instead keeps growing and spreading continuously.

However it is possible to grow moss in a new area, even on the side of a plant pot. The easiest way is to use a kitchen blender in which you put moss, living and/or dead, and add milk and water. Blend thoroughly and paint the result on the place you want the moss to grow. Keep it in the open so that it can take nutrients from the air, and keep it damp. I have proved that it is also possible to grow moss on a plant pot by painting it with pure milk.

Answer: Seahorse

The female deposits her eggs in a pouch which the male seahorse has on his stomach and he broods them there until they are sufficiently large enough to fend for themselves. Then he shoots them out into the sea with contractions that push them out of their nursery.

Answer: Okapi

An okapi is an animal related to the giraffe and is a mammal, giving birth to live calves. A duckbilled platypus, although a mammal, does lay eggs. A red admiral is a butterfly and lays eggs, as does any other butterfly. An albatross is a bird and therefore lays eggs.

Although they seldom come to land, preferring to remain at sea, they will find a deserted area of rocky coast to build their nests.

Answer: Purple loosestrife and dandelions

Purple loosestrife has tall purple flowers and long thin seed pods in which the feather coated seeds are tightly packed. On a warm, windy day the pods open and the seeds drift away in the wind. As children we used to try to catch them, believing they were fairies that could grant us a wish.

Dandelions grow their seeds on the head atop their stem and so form a beautiful, delicate sphere which the wind demolishes. This is another favourite for children, who call the heads dandelion clocks, and count the puffs it takes to blow them all away, which is supposed to give you the hour of the day.

Answer: Under the leaves

True ferns do not have flowers, or tendrils of any sort. The leaves are very beautiful with indentations on each side, and indentations on the indentations. The formation is very geometric and the spores grow beneath the leaves in equally geometric formations, looking like tiny, but very attractive, brown warts.

Answer: The squirrels bury the acorns and so plant them

The seeds of an oak tree are the acorns, which have no hooks to cling to anything. Squirrels bury a lot of acorns to store for eating during the winter when they wake from their fitful hibernation, but they forget where they planted some and these can grow into new trees.

There are many seeds that are eaten and pass through the digestive tracts of animals, some berries, for example, but not acorns.

Answer: tadpoles

These creatures are amphibians. Many children collect them as eggs (spawn) and and keep them in improvised aquaria. As tadpoles they can be very aggressive, and even if well fed, are cannibalistic, so not many reach maturity in captivity while fish and water birds eat them in the wild.

The run off from agricultural land that has been treated with chemicals has been known to interfere with the growing cycle and a number of tadpoles have continued to grow larger until they die, instead of making their final change to adult creatures. I have seen frog tadpoles that were three inches long, so I was glad to find normal ones in my garden pond and granted them a safe haven. After all they repaid me by eating the midges that flew about there.