Friday Pic #6: Sporangia
Upon digging through some old folders on the computer I found some nearly psychedelic pictures taken during a course in organism biology. We spent a lot of time in a lab looking at pre-prepped slides of plant and animal tissues, marvelling at the incredibly beautiful staining (and hopefully learning a thing or two in the process). Below is a picture of the sorus of some fern - you’ve probably seen them sometime, small brown clumps on the underside of a fern leaf. Except in botany class, it’s not brown:
A sorus is in fact composed of many small sporangia, where the spores are formed. The sporangia, when mature, flick the spores away from the mother plant. Here’s a close-up of some sporangia, where you can see the individual spores inside them:
I took the pictures simply by holding my digital camera up to the eyepiece (or one of them) of the microscope. Modern technology, eh?