- Animals are a common pollinator in flowers. Most people have seen a bee or a butterfly buzzing around a flower in the spring or summer. The insects are attracted to certain flowers because of their bright colors or fragrant aroma. Insects use the flowers for food or other purposes, but they are also unwittingly helping the flower species to survive. When insects land on the male flowers, the sticky pollen attaches to their bodies and then rubs off on the female flowers when they visit them. This starts the process of fertilization and makes the production of a new seed possible.
- For some flowering plants, as well as many weeds and trees, the wind takes care of pollination. Wind-pollinated plants often have billions of lightweight pollen particles that float easily on the breeze. As the wind blows, the pollen flies through the air, hopefully to land on female plants of the same species downwind. The female stigma is often feathery and exposed to the wind to better the chances of catching the pollen. About 12 percent of the flowering plants on earth are wind-pollinated.
- Water pollination is the rarest form of pollen transfer among flowers, although it does happen in some instances. Water plants such as water hyacinth or monochoria are aquatic flowering plants that can pollinate by surface hydrophily, or by pollen particles floating on the surface of the water to another plant. In the rarest cases, the pollen can even travel underwater.
- Self-pollination occurs when a plant has both male and female parts on the same flower. These types of plants often have small flowers that produce pollen near the upper portion of the flower. This pollen drops onto the female portion of the flower to fertilize itself. The flowering plants reproduced in this way are often more uniform than cross-pollinated species.