Compare And Contrast Ferns And Autotrophytes

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BIO 1500: Lab
Ta: Shelby
Pratyush Mahapatra
7/23/16
Plant types compare and contrast report
Bryophytes, ferns, gymnosperms, and angiosperms are all plants and autotrophic in nutrition. Autotrophic means of or relating to organisms (as green plants) that can make complex organic nutritive compounds from simple inorganic sources by photosynthesis.
When mosses and liverworts first evolved, they dominated the terrestrial environment. But they were soon challenged by the more advanced tracheophytes. The ferns and "fern allies" formed the great planetary forests of the late Paleozoic. By the end of the Paleozoic, a new group of plants was challenging the 150 million-year domination of the ferns and fern allies. The seed plants protected the embryonic sporophyte from drying up by encasing it in a tough waterproof seed coat. The evolution of the seed is as profound a step as the evolution of the shelled egg in reptiles. Just as the evolution of the amniotic egg enabled reptiles to become the first truly …show more content…

The basic life cycle for all plants is sporophyte (adult) > spore > gametophyte > gamete > fertilization > sporophyte. For bryophytes, the gametophyte and the sporophyte phases are vastly different in structure; in moss the gametophyte looks like green fuzz, but its sporophyte is a hooded stalk. Seedless vascular plants are similar in that these phases are also very conspicuous, but to a lesser extent. Ferns, for example, have typical plant-like sporophytes (the leafy fronds everyone is familiar with), and its gametophyte stage is a tiny, heartshaped, leaf-like structure. The difference between bryophytes and seedless vascular plants however, is that seedless vascular plants have vascular tissue ("plumbing" for sugar and water transport), and bryophytes don't (water is absorbed directly through the surfaces of the

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