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The moss life-cycle starts with a haploid spore that germinates to produce a protonema (pl. protonemata), which is either a mass of thread-like filaments or thalloid (flat and thallus-like). Massed moss protonemata typically look like a thin green felt, and may grow on damp soil, tree bark, rocks, concrete, or almost any other reasonably stable ...
Plants that are homosporous produce spores of the same size and type. Heterosporous plants, such as seed plants , spikemosses , quillworts , and ferns of the order Salviniales produce spores of two different sizes: the larger spore (megaspore) in effect functioning as a "female" spore and the smaller (microspore) functioning as a "male".
Many club-moss gametophytes are mycoheterotrophic and long-lived, residing underground for several years before emerging from the ground and progressing to the sporophyte stage. [4] Lycopodiaceae and spikemosses (Selaginella) are the only vascular plants with biflagellate sperm, an ancestral trait in land plants otherwise only seen in bryophytes.
Heterospory evolved due to natural selection that favoured an increase in propagule size compared with the smaller spores of homosporous plants. [2] Heterosporous plants, similar to anisosporic plants [clarification needed], produce two different sized spores in separate sporangia that develop into separate male and female gametophytes.
Some lycophytes are homosporous while others are heterosporous. [5] When broadly circumscribed, the lycophytes represent a line of evolution distinct from that leading to all other vascular plants, the euphyllophytes, such as ferns, gymnosperms and flowering plants.
Most heterosporous plants there are two kinds of sporangia, termed microsporangia and megasporangia. Sporangia (clustered in sori) on a fern leaf Equisetum arvense strobilus cut open to reveal sporangia. Sporangia can be terminal (on the tips) or lateral (placed along the side) of stems or associated with leaves.
The Marchantiophyta (/ m ɑːr ˌ k æ n t i ˈ ɒ f ə t ə,-oʊ ˈ f aɪ t ə / ⓘ) are a division of non-vascular land plants commonly referred to as hepatics or liverworts.Like mosses and hornworts, they have a gametophyte-dominant life cycle, in which cells of the plant carry only a single set of genetic information.
Curled up Selaginella tamariscina Wallace's Selaginella (Selaginella wallacei). Selaginella, also known as spikemosses or lesser clubmosses is a genus of lycophyte.It is usually treated as the only genus in the family Selaginellaceae, with over 750 known species.