Fern Plant
The ferns are seedless plant, and unlike more primitive plants such as the mosses, they have water vessels made of cells arranged in a tube-like fashion, which functions in water transport. Ferns reproduce primarily via spores. If the spores are able to disperse, mostly by wind, to suitable habitat, it will generate the next life stage which will produce the eggs and sperms required to produce the fern plants that we usually see. If you look at the underside of fern leaves, you might see small rounded spots, or sori, containing numerous microscopic enclosures, each contains plentiful of spores.
Each sori consists of numerous spores-containing sacs. |
There are many types of fern plants—some has the leaves or stem growing directly upward from a rhizome or rootstalk, which creep above or just below the ground. For example, the fern Dicranopteris linearis, apart from dispersing using spores, also spread by way of creeping rhizome, forming thick thicket especially in cleared land and rainforest margins. Other type of ferns have thick, erect stem such as the tree ferns. Still others are epiphyte plant like the Bird’s Nest Fern.
Thickets of Dicranopteris linearis ferns. |