u kno lads……..i used to think i knew some things about what a ‘spore’ was. u kno? like a spore? like what ferns and fungi reproduce with? like seeds but anatomically different? i used to be like, ‘ah, a spore, a microscopic packet of information that is different from a seed’. o how foolish i was my lads.
if you’ve been following me for a little bit, you might know that i’m writing a term paper on the plant family isoetes, which is a really small, niche, prehistoric family that garners a lot of interest in some parts of the botanical community. isoetes is one of the hardest plant families ive come across to talk about and explain because its so incredibly Fucked Up in just like, so many ways, like oh my god, but it’s in the same broad taxonomic group as ferns to give a basic starting point, and from there:
now, as i noted above, isoetes has spores, not seeds. it has sacs of spores at the base of its ‘leaves’ that mature, then split off from the plant itself to go root downstream:
because like that makes sense, that’s obviously the best and most effective way to make reproduce (why not? why the fuck not? isoetes does not abide by our puny human rules of how a plant ‘’’’’’’’probably shouldnt’’’’’’’’ reproduce)
now i have never seen a real, live isoetes with my own eyes. i’d seen a lot of pictures in the books i was looking through, and i’d read a lot of stuff explaining how to identify them using their spores, and i’d also read that the spores were large, as in, some of the largest in the plant kingdom. then, i decided that i needed to see this plant for myself, and the best way to do that was to look at some of the specimens in my university’s herbarium.
but i just was not prepared. i was not fucking prepared for seeing what isoetes spores actually look like. im still absolutely Shook.
ive done my best to make a size reference here by putting a paperclip on the herbrium sheet. this plant has it’s leaves still attached, and on this particular specimen of the pouches has broken open and spilled out the spores themselves. which i then had to witness with my own two eyes.
behold:
this is the plant (it’s an older specimen that’s a little beaten up, but you can see the roots just below the paperclip and the remains of the tips of the leaves up top). the paperclip is rested on the ‘pouch’ sections. under a microscope:
*take a look at that snout voice* TAKE A LOOK AT THOSE SPORES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
more absolutely wild to me was that not only could u see the spores at like, 25x magnification on a microscope (seriously like they’re big enough that you could prob see them on ur fingers with ur naked eye) but that you could see the defining features. this was what they were talking about when they were talking about how to identify them with their spores!!!! this is fucking wild like look at this shit:
vanhalenofficial 