Plants are able to reproduce in two different ways - sexual reproduction and asexual reproducion. Sexual reproduction involves pollen from one flower fertilising the egg of another to produce a seed.

There are, however, rare examples of asexual species that reproduce by cloning. Each offspring is genetically identical to the parent, with little variation generation after generation.

investigators discovered that introduced plants had gained the ability to reproduce faster by clonal propagation, a method of asexual reproduction that creates genetically identical copies of a plant.

The finding may offer insight into a long standing question in evolutionary biology about what forces cause species to choose sex over asexual reproduction and vice versa, he said. On paper, ...