Maple trees all over chang'an can distinguish males and females

striped maple tree can be transformed to open flowers of different genders.
not easy to be a woman, so is the female tree. A study of the life cycle of maple trees that change gender stripes with the seasons suggests that healthy maple trees are more likely to be male, and that most maple trees die when they bloom. The results were published in the Botany Yearbook.
suspect that they are changing gender, which is relatively rare in plants, " he said. Jennifer Blake-Mahmud of Princeton University said she tracked the life cycle of striped maple trees in New Jersey forests and parks from 2014 to 2017.
spring, Blake-Mahmud visits 457 striped maple trees, measures their diameter, leaves and branches, and records whether they are female or male.
found that 54 percent of maple trees had switched genders in four years, a <2> of them at least twice.
based on data collected by Blake-Mahmud, show that, contrary to previous theories, healthy maple trees are more likely to be male, and that the size of the trees does not affect their sex.
also found that trees that had been female for years were growing at a slower rate, while 75 percent of the dead maple trees had female flowers before they died.
is not clear why this is the case. Blake-Mahmud explains that this may be because females need more nutrients because they produce seeds, which make trees more likely to "kill."
but perhaps when a tree is close to death, it will turn to females as a last-minute effort to reproduce and pass on genes to the next generation of