Thursday, February 12, 2009
Spores ( from outer space? )
Somebody wrote me and asked me about my Lecanopteris mirabilis yeasterday. It's a tropical ant-fern with plate-like rhizomes under which ants can live. It's also a very beautiful plant, and something of a headache since I've never been able to get it to root well from cuttings. The cuttings will survive on their own for a remarkable number of months, but they seem to be hesitant to grow.
In any case, this person was looking to get the plant, and mentioned that if I had some mature fronds ( with spores ), he or I might be able to propagate it that way. So I went out to the greenhouse, looked around a bit, and found a fertile frond. This inspired me to try something I've never tried before - growing a fern from spores.
I've always been confused by the fern life cycle. They generate spores, each spore can grow into a little tiny plant called a prothallus, which then generates male and female sexual cells, which then combine with each other and form a new fern. This has always bugged me - it's way too indirect or something, I guess.
So I picked off a frond from my Lecanopteris mirabilis, and put it on a piece of white paper on top of my chest freezer. Almost immediately, what I assume are spores began to be launched out of the spore patches. And by launched, I mean that they seem to actually be propelled some distance away from the frond ... I prepared a substrate by putting some sort of sterilized peat from a jiffy peat pellet into a plastic petri dish, and then shook some of the spore material off the paper and onto the peat.
The petri dish is now sitting on a shelf in my germination area, and I'm waiting for the prothalli to form. I guess we'll see what happens.
I took some photomicrographs of the spore material that I collected. There are little alien-looking brown things, sort of yellow spherical globs, and a bunch of white hairs. I'm assuming that the yellow spheres are the spores, the alien brown things are somehow related to releasing the spores, and the hairs are just there for decoration.
