What is a thing that many plants do to reproduce but animals do not do?
The alternative to sexual reproduction is, wait for it, asexual reproduction. There are a couple of different forms. A plant may produce buds from the trunk or a branch , which are outgrowths that contain new cells, and can eventually break off and form a new plant.Some plants have both sperm producing AND egg producing organs, the pistil and the stamen*. In that way it self fertilizes. Self-fertilization is not the optimal way to create variation in a population, however. That's where the bees and the hummingbirds become useful. Certain plants secrete a sweet material that attracts flying insects. The insects rub up against the pistil or the stamen,* I can't remember which, and transfers the pollen to the receptive organs of another member of the species. The friar/botanist Gregor Mendel spent many a year toiling in his Monastery Garden counting the results and variations of reproduction in pea plants to show us the orderliness and predictability of the inheritance of traits. Mendel's work was rediscovered several decades after Darwin published his work on the Origins of Species.The modern Theory of evolution is a synthesis of the work of Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and the DNA Revolution begun by Watson and Crick when they built the first DNA molecule model. Throw in a whole bunch of fossils and you have the makings of a pretty big deal.*Check my memory or mis- remembrance of the parts of a plant.