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Macro pIcture of a sporophyte


Koen C.

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Edit: This Sphagnum is Sphagnum fimbriatum, it's growing almost choked by surrounding S. palustre.

For the first time, i see sporophytes on some of my Sphagnum. The spore capsules are so small I barely noticed them. They grow on a thin species that ocassionaly manages to keep itself alive in a pot of a more robust species of Sphagnum. I think there are only 3 strands alive in that pot. I'm not sure but I assume the species is self fertile, i would be surprised if I had both a male and a female clone of that plant.

I'll try and germinate the spores, just as experiment. Would be nice to see the moss develop, but I'm pretty sure it's not easy to make germaninate. Any tips are welcome!

sporophy (6)bis

 

Edited by Koen C.
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Update: I sowed the spores in two different conditions on peat. I cooked the peat for 10 minutes. I have germination in one of the pots, but I'm not sure if it's from the Sphagnum spores I sowed, or from spores that didn't die. This pictures shows protonemata from what I hope to be a Sphagnum. Google images isn't really helpful on how they should look like. If anyone knows for sure what it is, let me know

17th of July

DSC_0417

(This is a macro pictures, the plants are really tiny) 14th of August

DSC_0418 crop

 

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Thank you all for the kind words. Update: A lot of the protonemata are dying or becoming white instead of green. I'm not sure what's wrong, maybe I should try to put them in higher light, they are quite shady at the moment. But quite a bit of them have formed gametophores (Adult moss plants). They are still really young and I don't see any resemblence with Sphagnum yet, but I'm almost 99 pcnt sure it should be Sphagnum. I'm really curious to see how it keeps developing. 

6th of september 2017:

DSC_0436 crop

 

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This is a really short, but amazing video showing the spore ejection from sphagnum. It was apparently a mystery how they got the spores so high, until they filmed it at very high speed and saw that the capsule actually developed a vortex ring, and with that could send the spores much higher than just a straightforward squirt.

 

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Crazy, I wonder how complex the inner structure of that capsule has to be in order to reach this effect. The explosion of the capsule on itself is already impressive. Funny what big efforts this tiny plant has to do to ensure its existence and reproduction.

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