Q.Differentiate Fission and Fragmentation with suitable examples.

Fission is regular division of the parent body into a fixed, usually equal number of daughter cells; fragmentation is irregular breaking of the body into pieces that each regrow into a whole individual.

In fission, a single-celled or simple multicellular parent organism divides its body, following mitotic nuclear division, into daughter individuals of comparable size. Binary fission produces exactly two daughter cells, as seen in Amoeba, Paramecium and most bacteria; multiple fission produces many daughter individuals simultaneously from a single parent, as seen in Plasmodium (the malarial parasite), where the parent nucleus divides repeatedly before the cytoplasm partitions around each nucleus. Fragmentation, by contrast, occurs when the parent body -- often a simple, filamentous, or otherwise easily broken organism -- breaks (naturally, due to ageing, or due to physical disturbance such as water currents) into several often irregular fragments, and each fragment, provided it contains enough of the essential body organisation, is capable of regenerating the missing parts and growing into a complete new individual. Examples include the breaking up of Spirogyra filaments into smaller pieces th …