A fern is a plant. A plant is supposed to get pollinated by bees and whatnot. Yet ferns have sperm swimming around and fertilizing the lady-bits of other fern.
Mind blown.
A fern is a plant. A plant is supposed to get pollinated by bees and whatnot. Yet ferns have sperm swimming around and fertilizing the lady-bits of other fern.
Mind blown.
More interesting to me is that a full fern life cycle takes two generations to play out. A diploid (two sets of each chromosome) fern throws off spores, and the spores grow into haploid (one set of each chromosome) plantlets. The haploid plantlets fertilize each other, and boom, the offsping are diploid ferns.
Truly interesting, isn’t it? Even cooler is that more ‘modern’ flowering plants do the same thing, but they have truncated and miniaturized the haploid phase so it is completely dependent on the diploid sporophyte.
Don’t get me started on mosses. I have to go to work!
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Did you know that Richard Ayoade, who played Moss in ‘the IT-crowd’ debuted on tv in ‘Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace’?
That is technically on topic, so well done!
Ok but what if we want to know more about mosses