Sphaerocarpos season in full swing

Incapable of falling asleep the other night, I pulled out one of those rummage sale books that I had never really spent time with. Gilbert Smith's Cryptogamic Botany Volume II: Bryophytes & Peteridophytes. This would have been a standard university botany textbook in the post-WWII era, with careful attention given to anatomy and architecture at a time when the genetic underpinnings of plant diversity and development were not so easily studied. Without cladograms or codons, the book focuses heavily on apical cells and the development of reproductive bits for hints to the origins of the diverse groups that if covers. One of the riveting upsides of this was a very cohesive contemplation of the liverwort order Sphaerocarpales (remarkably conserved in the 75+ years since original publication). Like Cycads, Ginkgos, Spike Mosses, Ephedra and other anomalous groups, balloonworts just stick out as different from other plants. The curiousity was enough that Smith in the 1940s and 1950s was summarizing careful (and numerous!) developmental studies of Sphaerocarpos from as far back as the early 1800s.

Despite my own fixation with these bubbly little liverworts, I didn't really understand what was going on in the bubbles. In the photos below you can see clusters of both "large" bubbles (about 1mm tall) and "small" bubbles (<.5mm tall). Bigger bubbles belong to the female plants, with each bubble enclosing a single archegonium. In kind, the smaller bubbles of the male plants enclose a single antheridium. When the antheridium mature and rupture, the flagellate sperm rest motionless in a liquid generated within said antheridium. It is only when this liquid oozes out and make contact with rain or surface water that the sperm begin to swim. Fascinating. This was all likely happening today in the photos I took of Sphaerocarpos texanus. You can see these little bubbles oozing and mixing with water, allowing for the motile gametes to seek out nearby eggs. This particular population is fertile, with sporophytes having been observed in previous years.

This is all a long winded way to say that despite the bleak weather in the pacific northwest of late, Balloonwort Season is upon us. This map shows general areas of the PNW where it has been observed in the iNaturalist system. @bstarzomski is the real ferret for this group and we have decided that on the coast, it seems to like seasonally saturated to marginally moist fine, silty-sandy and frequently disturbed sediments near the ocean. The local populations I watch are (1) adjacent to a playground on kid-tattered grassless patches in what was intented to be a lawn and (2) in a seasonal campground that is loaded with RVs in the the summer. The thing is just so incredibly small and ephemeral that it is easy to miss, but I suspect concerted efforts would turn it up in other regions and fill in the intersticies of that map.

If anyone reading this is near any of the following spots and willing to get down on your hands and knees, I think the following spots could be productive at this time of year:

Vancouver
Kits/Jericho Beach areas, especially around here
Cates Park in West Vancouver (large lawny area around the playground)
Fraser River Park
Burnaby Fraser Foreshore Park

Victoria
see @bstarzomski 's many observations here

Nanaimo
Neck Point Park

Ladysmith
Transfer Beach Park (grass by the playground and picnic tables next to shore)

Port Alberni
Canal Waterfront Park

Anacortes
Green Point at Washington Park

Posted on Ιανουάριος 23, 2024 0328 ΠΜ by rambryum