Sunday, September 6, 2015

Botany picture #213: leafy liverwort sporophyte


Recently went through a couple of old pictures and found this very lucky photograph. It is already a bit lucky to find liverwort sporophytes because in contrast to those of mosses and hornworts they are very soft-bodied and short-lived. And then I was lucky enough to get quite a decent snapshot despite limited light in the understorey and the notorious problems my camera has with focusing on thin objects.

I do not know the species or even the genus, but it is a leafy liverwort growing on a log in a southern New South Wales national park in 2012, and it shows some of the typical traits of a liverwort sporophyte: soft stalk, sporangium (~capsule) opening with four valves, and the longish elaters in the sporangium that help disperse the spores with their hygroscopic movement.

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