Measuring beauty in millimetres

“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.” ~ Arthur Conan Doyle.

We miss the little things. Wolves are much more prominent than wasps. This is the way our minds have evolved. Four billion years of evolution has led us to this: we are programmed to pay attention to things we consider big: Elephants and lions, wolves and hyenas, coconut palms and eagles. It is rare to run into people who actually like to look at ants with smiles on their faces. But once you are one of them, there is no going back. Beauty is in the little things.

A moss seems to be a carpet on wet floors. Why, it even feels like one! Surprising, isn't it, that when we look closer, the moss takes up a form and dimension you never thought possible? 

A moss' sporophytic parts standing out

Mosses are quite fascinating. They belong to the division of plants called the bryophytes. Amphibians of the plant kingdom. 

If you took any of the cells of your body, and kept it under a microscope powerful enough,after staining it with an appropriate stain, such as acetocarmine, you would see forty-six discrete packets of DNA, which scientists refer to as chromosomes. The interesting thing is that these are actually twenty-three pairs: each pair has two chromosomes: one from your mother, another from your father. This is the case in most animals, and so many plants. However, if you took an egg-cell, or a sperm-cell, they would have only twenty-three. Twenty-three is said to be the ploidy of human beings. If a cell has twenty-three chromosomes, it is haploid. If it has forty-six, it is said to be diploid. 

Different organisms have different ploidies. The ploidy of a dog is thirty-nine, so a dog's cells will have seventy-eight chromosomes. Cats have thirty eight. Butterflies have three-hundred and eighty. A fern called Ophioglossum has a staggering thousand two-hundred and sixty chromosomes.

Not all organisms have cells which are diploid. The wheat you eat, for instance, is hexaploid. It has a number of chromosomes six times its ploidy. Male honeybees, called drones, are haploid in all their cells. They have only one set of chromosomes, from their mother, the Queen. Here is where the moss becomes interesting.

In that picture up there, the green, leafy part is haploid. For a large part of the moss' life, it forms its entire body. It has organs for sexual reproduction: The male part is called the antheridium, and the female part is called the archegonium. But, once the sperm of the moss fertilises the egg, something magical happens. A diploid sporophyte pushes its way through the haploid gametophyte. A sporophyte has two parts: a long thread-like seta, and crowning it, a capsule, containing many more haploid spores, which will all give birth to plenty of new mosses. And so the moss perennates. 

A bounty of information lies hidden in that little carpet of green spread out on a bare patch of wet rock, or a moist stretch of brick wall. Every little thing has its own secrets, hidden from our sight. It is up to us, to discover them.

Sources:

http://ncert.nic.in/NCERTS/l/lebo101.pdf

Photo credits:

Pooja C Nathan

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The secret life of the weaver ant.