🌈☔🌦️🍄🌱🍉Feb 24, 2025

Dear moss lovers, would you like to share what in moss it is that brings you joy?

For me it is many things, its tiny magnificent beaty, its resilience and patience, how they are tiny little eco systems or forests, how they hold water. How they are ancient in their own way.

#Mosstodon #MossMonday #Moss #MacroMoss

Show threadundead enby of the apocalypseMar 1, 2025
@wmd those are some really cool sporophytes!!
Show threadundead enby of the apocalypse
@wmd fun fact: most of the moss, the gametophyte, is haploid (only has one copy of each chromosome). Those long skinny stalks are the sporophyte, which is diploid (has two copies of each chromosome, like we do). This is pretty unusual, and I think it’s pretty cool. The gametophyte is also called that because it produces gametes (sperms and eggs), which when fertilized produce a sporophyte. The sporophyte is called that because it produces spores, which after being spread produce more gametophytes.
Mar 1, 2025 at 8:44amWeb
Show threadundead enby of the apocalypseMar 1, 2025
@wmd it basically works like that for plants in general, but for most land plants the sporophyte, not the gametophyte is the vast majority of what we see of the plant, and the gametophyte is tiny and reduced to its bare essentials (and spores don’t usually really get spread as the gametophyte grows directly on the sporophyte… except for ferns, ferns do have a tiny gametophyte that grows on the ground, though most of what we see of ferns is the sporophyte). Mosses are kind of an outlier and I think that’s pretty fascinating.