Moss Generations.

There is so much we don’t know with everything around us… so many things we didn’t see and have taken for granted. And I am grateful I have a camera to see some of these things, capture them and sometimes what even more fascinating is learning something new about them. This is what happened when some mosses in our backyard caught my attention one day and thought they were about to bloom some flowers and made me search the Internet about them.

According to botanist mosses (which is classified as a Bryophytes and not plant) have two generations. One is the gametophyte – this is the green that we commonly see all year round. And there’s the sporophyte that grows up occasionally out of the gametophyte and they may have a different color other than green. At the end of its stalk is a capsule holding spores. What I find fascinating with them is that gametophytes are either a male or female and each one producing a sperm and egg respectively. They mate by means of water and this reproduction produces the sporophyte. The sporophyte grows with a capsule that is filled with thousands of spores which will then be released when matured and turn into another gametophyte.

To fully understand the life cycle of a moss here’s the link: Life Cycle of a Moss.

The common gametophyte we usually see.

A sporophyte capsule (which looks like an abaca material) that contains spores inside.

Related articles

• Moss (putyourhandstowork.wordpress.com)
• Need to Read: New species of moss discovered on trees planted at Welsh car park (walesonline.co.uk)
• Green Mosses. (greatgreths.wordpress.com)