Elodea Fragmentation

The elodea plant, also called water weeds, are plants freshwater plants that grow underwater either loosely rooted or floating around freely. Elodea is native to North and South America and is also widely used as household aquarium vegetation. Elodea rapidly grows through fragments of the plant being dispersed in the water by water currents and human activities. Since no female elodea exists in the United States it has adapted a form of reproduction called fragmentation. Fragmentation is a form of asexual reproduction among many vegetations. The split involved in the fragmentation process is called mitosis, the splitting of a nucleus into two nuclei with identical chromosomes. Due to this, there is no diversity in fragmentation, so when the
elodea plant reproduces, it is a carbon copy of its parent plant.

The elodea plant is a typical plant cell. It has a tough cell wall giving it a rectangular shape. There are various chloroplasts that color the plant and allow it to feed itself through photosynthesis. Under a microscope, you can see the little chloroplasts through the clear cell and that the vacuole takes up most of the room. The nucleus is clear and hidden within the cell. If placed in salt water, the elodea plant will experience diffusion.

Osmosis is the movement of molecules in and out of plant and animal cells when exposed to a living environment different from its own.
For example, in slugs, there is no barrier between their cell walls and the outside of them. So, when salt is poured on a slug, its body attempts to maintain equilibrium and the water is drawn out of the slugs body causing it to dry up and die. Diffusion is when the molecules in a cell are moving from a highly concentrated place to a low concentrated place. In for example, in air diffusers, the concentrated scent will release into the lowly concentrated air resulting in the air smelling nice. The process of plasmolysis is when the cell is losing water in a hypertonic solution. A hypertonic solution is when there is a greater concentration of solutes on the outside of a cell when compared with the inside of a cell. When referring to plant cells, turgid is when there is a high concentration inside the cell, and places in a more dilute environment known as a hypotonic solution. Meaning that hypotonic means when there is a greater concentration inside the cell when compared to the outside. Lastly, an isotonic solution is when equilibrium is achieved and the concentration, or lack thereof, is equal inside and outside of the
cell.