Nearly 50 people are attending this year’s John Child Bryophyte and Lichen Workshop in Ohakune. Bryophytes include mosses and liverworts.
The Workshop is a focussed opportunity to study these small plants. Although usually overlooked, they actually make a huge contribution to forest biomass and functioning.
Mosses and liverworts reproduce by spores, as do ferns. Spores are also part of the life cycle of seed plants (including conifers and flowering plants), but they also produce a more specialised structure that we’re also more familiar with – their seeds. Bryophytes, liverworts, ferns, and lichens all do not produce seeds.
In mosses, the spores are made in a capsule that is usually held on a thin, wiry stalk.
In liverworts, the spores are made in a capsule that is usually held on a thicker, fleshy stalk.
Lichens are also part of the Workshop’s scope. Lichens are actually two (or more) organisms living together: a fungus, providing ‘shelter’; and a photosynthetic partner (an alga or a photosynthetic bacterium), providing ‘food’ by harvesting sunlight.
Three of Te Papa’s botanists (plant scientists) are attending the Workshop. The Workshop allows us to share and extend our knowledge, and grow Te Papa’s botanical collections.
Before the Workshop in Ohakune, a small group including Te Papa’s team collected mosses, liverworts, lichens, and ferns from along the Forgotten Highway (State Highway 43) between Stratford and Taumarunui.
The plants are a high-level lichen
At first botanists thought that lichens are the plant. Later, they found that lichens are a organization that maked from symbiosis of fungi and algae. Now botanists believe that the plants are a unified and independent organism. But I’ve realized this that, all of plants have been formed from the juxtaposition of fungi and algae similar lichens. The difference between plants and lichens is that the:
In lichens, egg cells are separated, and each one growing individually and make algae and fungi separately. Then algae and fungi become symbiotic together.
But in plants, egg cells are merged. The egg cells of algae and fungi, merged together in the zygote of the plant. When the growth of plant seed, in fact fungi and algae growth and building up the body of a plant.
And any tissue of the plant, is a member of coexistence. Parenchymal tissues of the plant are the algae cells. Vascular tissue of the plant, are the fungus cells. There is much evidence for this theory.
Hello Ramin,
The hypothesis in your second and third-to-last sentences is new to me. You say there is much evidence, so feel free to post links to reputable sources, including peer-reviewed articles, so that others can learn more.