Do stems of a plant have stomates?
The answer is yes in some plants specially in a type of cactus that has no leaves.The stem’s epidermis has stomata. An obvious feature that the persistent epidermis of a stem-photosynthetic, leafless succulent must have is stomata. Although stem epidermis in many species do have stomata, Urs Eggli in Zurich discovered that stems of the early cacti may have lacked stomata in their epidermis: plants of Pereskia almost completely lack stomata in their stem epidermis (Pereskia is the cactus genus whose members – rather ordinary woody, leafy trees – retain the greatest number of relictual features). Maurizio Sajeva, however, found that in contrast to Pereskia, the stems of all ordinary cacti (that is, the members of subfamilies Cactoideae and Opuntioideae – the cacti that look obviously like cacti) do have stomata and at densities almost as high as in the lower epidermis of Pereskia leaves. If the early evolution of cacti involved obtaining the ability to produce stomata where they had not
