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.
Only flowering plants are pollinated by bees and even then not all of them. Ferns evolved before flowers existed so of course they need a different way to breed.
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!
I would like to subscribe to your moss facts newsletter
Did you know that Richard Ayoade, who played Moss in ‘the IT-crowd’ debuted on tv in ‘Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace’?
Ok but what if we want to know more about mosses
Flowering plants first evolved in the late Cretaceous. Ferns are old. Ferns are really old. They aren’t fertilized by insects
That’s extremely interesting!
Does this mean it’s off-topic for Mildly Interesting?
yes. this is TIL.
So basically they’re just throwing horny Michael Phelpses (Michaels Phelp?) all around the place? I approve.
Awesome.
I do too, but no one finds that interesting
