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Friday, February 29, 2008

Friday Pic #6: Sporangia

Filed under: Nature, Friday Pic

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:

Sorus

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:

Sporangia

I took the pictures simply by holding my digital camera up to the eyepiece (or one of them) of the microscope. Modern technology, eh?

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2 Comments »

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  1. Oh beautiful! I always messed up staining..I still do. Can you believe it-it took me 1.5 years to get Gram’s Staining!

    Comment by Anne — Saturday, March 1, 2008 @ 12:48

  2. hey girl, very cool your pic’s…
    =]

    Comment by Anderson — Thursday, March 12, 2009 @ 00:58

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