No seeds, no fruits, no flowers: no problem.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Virginia ferns, part II: Dryopteris

Continuing the posts about our trip to Virginia with some photos of Dryopteris, the wood ferns! Most of these are of D. campyloptera, the mountain woodfern. It is an allopolyploid of D. expansa and D. intermedia, and has an interesting distribution, restricted to higher elevations and/or more northern latitudes in the eastern U.S.

D. campyloptera

Typical D. campyloptera habitat

D. campyloptera

More foggy mountain-top habitat!

D. marginalis

Monday, June 8, 2015

Virginia ferns, part I: Asplenium

Last week there was a once-in-a-decade fern conference held at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Every ten years or so the fern community gets together to hold such a meeting, and people come from around the world to hear about what's new and exciting in fern biology. Next Generation Pteridology was the name of this meeting and it was a great success and a lot of fun. After the conference, I headed to the field with some old fern friends to do a bit of exploring in western Virginia. We were particularly interested in finding populations of Asplenium and Dryopteris species, and we were successful. I'll post the pictures of Dryopteris in part II, but here are three species of Aspleniums and a few other botanical highlights.

Asplenium platyneuron

Asplenium trichomanes

Two Aspleniums

Asplenium rhizophyllum, the walking fern

Athyrium filix-femina, lady fern

Pellaea glabra

Some gratuitous lichens!

Monday, May 25, 2015

More Pine Rocklands

I've written before about a project on the endangered Pine Rocklands ecosystem of South Florida that I'm working on with my colleague Ben Baiser at UF and our master's student Lauren. We just went down to the Miami area for another field trip and it was great to see this habitat at another time of year - the previous trip had occurred in the fall. We managed to see a few more fern species that we had not seen on the last trip, as well as a few that are starting to become regulars.

Pleopeltis polypodioides

Vittaria lineata

Acrostichum danaeifolium

Anemia adiantifolia

Psilotum nudum

Palm tree with Nephrolepis

Friday, February 27, 2015

Ferns in the news: weird sex

Botanists say this plant is the fern equivalent of a human-lemur love child.

Photo by Harry Roskam

It's always a good day when ferns make the news, so the last few weeks have been pretty great! Carl Rothfels and colleagues have determined that two ferns alive today, but whose ancestors diverged from one another around 60 million years ago, have hybridized to form a new (although sterile) species. The new species is a hybrid between two different genera, Cystopteris and Gymnocarpium, and its name is Cystocarpium roskamianum. Intergeneric hybrids are very rare, because it becomes more and more difficult to be interfertile the more diverged two organisms are from one another. We often consider species to be units that are distinct from one another reproductively (although this is frequently untrue, particularly in plants), and genera are implicitly assumed to be even more so. There are four other known intergeneric hybrids in ferns, including Dryostichum singulare, a hybrid between Dryopteris goldiana and Polystichum lonchitis, but none involve parental genera as anciently diverged as Cystocarpium's. The authors use the analogy that this would be like a human and a lemur mating and producing offspring – the genetic distances involved are similar!

The story has been covered by a number of news outlets. Links are below, and I'm pleased to add that I was contacted for a comment for the NPR piece, which I very happily gave.

Friday, January 30, 2015

OTS Fern Course

I just got back from spending three weeks in Costa Rica, attending a special course on Tropical Ferns and Lycophytes from the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS). This course was first offered in the 1960s, and not again until 2008. I went on the 2008 course as a student, and returned this time as a visiting faculty member. We spent a few days in San Jose and then a week each at two OTS field stations, Las Cruces in the southern part of the country, and La Selva north of San Jose in lowland rainforest.

Las Cruces is particularly fun for the bird life, and many beautiful species show up for the daily offering of bananas outside the dining hall:

Blue-crowned motmot

Male green honeycreeper

Silver-throated tanager

Speckled tanager

And now just a few of the dozens (possibly hundreds) of ferns we saw over the course of three weeks...

Tiny sporophytes of Asplenium holophlebium

Hymenophyllum

Ophioglossum

Hymenophyllum sporangia with green spores apparent

Two members of Gleicheniaceae, Sticherus (darker green) and Gleicheniella (lighter green)

Gleicheniella

An tree tipup with incredibly dense fern gametophytes

Friday, November 28, 2014

Fern resource: Ferns and Lycophytes of the World

If you're looking for information and pictures of ferns, check out Ferns and Lycophytes of the World. This site is a great repository of information about ferns and lycophytes, and serves as a "digital herbarium", connecting collection information with keys, floras, photos, and more. Contributors to the site include a number of fern and lycophyte experts based all over the world, and you can sign up to contribute yourself if you're interested.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Ferns in and around Archbold Biological Station

My most recent field trip was to go fern-hunting in central Florida. My friend and colleague Eddie Watkins from Colgate University escaped the onset of fall in the north to come visit sunny Florida for a few days. We set out to collect spores of various fern species in order grow and include them in a study we're doing on fern mating systems. We visited Archbold Biological Station, and a Florida state park called Highlands Hammock. Both were beautiful, and with a diverse set of species at each location from which we were able to collect lots of fertile spore material.