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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 ...
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".
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.
Lycopodiaceae (homosporous lycophytes) split off from the branch leading to Selaginella and Isoetes (heterosporous lycophytes) about ~400 million years ago, during the early Devonian. The two subfamilies Lycopodioideae and Huperzioideae diverged ~350 million years ago, but has evolved so slowly that about 30% of their genes are still in ...
In the homosporous families Lycopodiaceae and Huperziaceae, spores germinate into bisexual free-living, subterranean and mycotrophic gametophytes that derive nutrients from symbiosis with fungi. In Isoetes and Selaginella , which are heterosporous, microspores and megaspores are dispersed from sporangia either passively or by active ejection. [ 8 ]
Scientists have identified a super resilient desert moss species in China's western region of Xinjiang that could help sustain possible colonies on Mars, a study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences ...
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 ...