It seems like all other non-asexual earth life forms (humans, animals, etc) suffer negative effects from a limited gene pool, inbreeding, etc. so why doesn’t it affect plants?
In: Biology
There are issues with inbreeding plants. A major issue is that they will all be susceptible to the same diseases. Bananas are all clones, and if there’s a particular disease that develops, it could wipe out all of the bananas in the world. In fact the world used to commonly eat the Gros Michel banana, but it got decimated by a fungus in the 1950s and now we eat Cavendish bananas instead.
It does, but the effects aren’t always so visibly obvious because it’s pretty hard to break a plant.
The broader concerns of narrow gene pools are still present, down to the extreme example of the all-clone banana crop’s severe infection weakness.
Plants don’t inbreed. They can ‘clone’ or they can reproduce sexually. A clone is exactly that, an exact copy of the host organism. If you reproduce sexually then you get a genetic recombination. Plants don’t control this like mammals do (since they are fertilized by the wind or insects) but those methods provide enough diversity to keep plants healthy.
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