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James Wong @Botanygeek
, 7 tweets, 3 min read Read on Twitter
THE BIOLOGY OF BABY GROOT. ⬇️

Baby groot is created from a cutting of Groot, an ambulant alien plant who dies at the end of the 1st Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

Geeks are hotly debating whether he is a ‘son’ of Groot or just Groot living on.

Botanist to the rescue...
Baby Groot is the result of a form of asexual reproduction known as vegetative propagation.

Plants, unlike most animals, retain their stem cells through their lives. So cloning them is super easy.

Baby Groot is therefore a perfect genetic clone of Big Groot.
‘Son’s’ tend to only share 1/2 their DNA with their parents. So this analogy is tricky. Genetically they are one and the same, more like identical twins.

(Unless, of course, Baby groot was actually grown from the pollen/spores/seeds emitted by Groot in the crash landing scene?)
If it was indeed pollen in that scene, it would suggest there is a mysterious ‘Lady Groot’ character we have so far not seen.

However, as many (most?) plants are simultaneously male and female, it is highly likely that we all have our pronouns wrong here!
And finally, as we now know even Earth plants can process complex information about the world around them & retain it without the need for a centralised storage organ like animals need (ie a brain).

If Baby groot is a cutting, it is likely it retains Big Groot’s memories!😱
And if you are cross about this thread proposing a speculative hypothesis about fictional, alien exobiology....

Congrats! You are even more of a geek than me. 🌿🌴🔬
As plants can be divided & propagated infinitely by cuttings, there may be many more Baby Groots on Xandar.

AND as plants can be grafted together w/o tissue rejection (like the diff blossoms in the below pic) the Baby Groots could be stitched together to make a MEGA GROOT!
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