Hello and happy weekend! I bet it’s safe to say you’ve seen a fern while out on your adventures. Did you know ferns are among the oldest living plants,(along with horsetails and mosses) having been here since before the dinosaurs? Or that they are one of 12,000 species of primitive plants that don’t rely on flowers to reproduce? Ferns come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and are often found growing in woods and wild fields. Did you know there are more than 20,000 different kinds of ferns in the world, with 380 found in North America. In my state of NC there are 70 different species of ferns! With so many it might be hard to pick a favorite. Do you have one? Which fern is your favorite?
All of those 20,000 species of ferns are different than flowering plants in that they don’t need pollinators like insects or birds to reproduce since they don’t have flowers. Instead, ferns reproduce through spores and have two generations of free-living plants, both completely different than the other. (These are called sporophyte and gametophyte.) The fern you recognize on a trail near you is the second generation of this non-flowering plant.
Perhaps you’ve noticed small dots in regular patterns on the underside of fern fronds and wondered what these were. These are called sporangia and are clustered in little groups called sori. Inside the sporangia are tiny spores that are eventually released and then fall onto the ground. Each sporangium usually has 64 spores and one fern has MANY, many sporangium. An average marginal fern can produce more than 65 million spores!!
So in last week’s video puzzler, it was “raining” spores! I happened to catch the fern at that exact moment when the caps released and forcefully thrust the spores out into the air and the gentle breeze was making them move and fall to the ground, like rain.
I’m going to be taking a break from the blog for a few weeks so there won’t be a new puzzler today. Also to note–I’m going to postpone the December 1st drawing I talked about because I have missed a few weeks while I was traveling and also because I haven’t had enough people answer correctly to even have a drawing.(Special thanks to those of you who DID try to guess! I appreciate you and will keep your names in the “hat” for the next drawing.) I will continue with the puzzlers and the drawing at a later date.
Have a great weekend! Enjoy the fall colors before the snow or wind or rain whips them away and settles them to the ground.