Winter gnats

With the winter being generally mild, there have been small swarms of winter gnats Trichocera sp. in the garden throughout, with their larvae probably feeding on the rotting leaves that we've piled up to make leaf mould.

Lately these long-legged little flies have gravitated towards the last few crab apples that are still hanging on the tree, gently rotting in the spring sunshine.

It's a convenient site for mating. When a female strays into the dancing swarms of males she's quickly captured ..... and so begins the next generation of winter gnats. The male is on the right. 

Pellia

Thursday's Guardian Country Diary is all about this very common thalloid liverwort Pellia epiphylla. It's hard to imagine a less charismatic plant but it is remarkable, in several ways.

It's confined to places that are permanently damp, so a shady ditch bank like this suits it well. It consists of a flattened green thallus that's anchored to the substrate by hair-like rhizoids.

Lobes of the thallus overlap and at this time of year make active growth, visible as the brighter green areas in this image.  

If you cut a thin vertical section through the thallus of the liverwort in mid-winter this is what you see (ignore those small, bright objects at the bottom of this image - they are starch grains).Those big round objects embedded in it are male antheridia, full of male sex cells called antherozoids, each of which is just a few thousanths of a millimetre long. Each is equipped with flagellae so when the antheridia burst the antherozoids can swim in the surface film of water. They are heading for .....

.... these female structures called archegonia, situated near the tip of the thallus. There are two here and you can see a dark egg cell inside one of them. The neck of each archegonium emits chemical signals that attract the swimming antherozoids. On mild, wet winter days the whole surface of the liverwort would be covered with tens of thousands of antherozoids, frantically attempting to swim to an archegonium. A few, perhaps assisted by rain splash, make it to their destination, swim down the neck of an archegonium and fertilise the egg cell.

So, in late February and early March, if you get down on your hand and knees with a magnifying glass you can see that this has been the site of very intense sexual activity. The evidence lies in those small, dark spherical structures on the surface. They are the first sign of  capsules full of spores forming, which develop from the fertilised egg.

Within a few days they become larger and darker and begin to rise on stalks - and that's a good time to bring some indoors and watch what happens next.

This picture was taken about 12 hours after the one above and the stalks have grown to about an inch long, while the capsules ...

... have become shiny black spheres.

The capsule stalk continues to grow until it's about three inches long, bending towards the light, then ...

..... the capsule explodes, in slow-motion!

It splits into four segments and a mass of green spores erupts, flicked out by hair-like cells called elaters.

After about five minutes most of the spores have been flicked out and have blown away ...

... leaving behind a mass of writhing elaters, before the stalk collapses

Here, under the microscope at low magnification, you can see the spores and their elaters.

At 400x magnification the structure of the elaters is visible. Each long cell has a spiral of thickening in its wall and when the elater is confined inside the intact capsule it is compressed like a spring. When their confinement is relieved the elaters act as biological springs, hurling out the spores.

Thalloid liverworts are the most ancient living land plants and have a fossil record dating back some 450 million years. When they first evolved those three inch-tall spore capsules would have been the tallest terrestrial vegetation on the planet. 

Today's thalloid liverworts seem to be very similar to their early ancestors. Somehow these simple plants have survived five great mass extinctions and if you measure success in terms of durability alone, then they are unequalled amongst terrestial plants.

Professor Small's Book of Tiny Wonders

When I went to university to read for a degree in botany, almost 46 years ago, there were only three pieces of equipment that I had to take with me:

• A white lab coat (bequeathed from my grandfather who was a dairyman and wore one for his daily work)
• A dissecting kit with a cut-throat razor for cutting sections of plants
• A hand lens, because a botany degree in those days involved a lot of field work

What reminded me of all this was this little book - Pocket-Lens Plant Lore by James Small, published in 1931, that I bought a few years ago for 50p. in a second-hand book shop. 

The author, appropriately named for someone who was writing about tiny objects, was Professor of Botany at Queen's University Belfast and seems to have written the book for his children, because the dedication reads:

To Sheila and Donn,

two small children who wanted to 

SEE THE INSIDES OF THINGS

It's a charming little book that, month-by-month, uses a hand lens to explore the features of 192 different plant species, including their buds, leaves, flowers and seeds.

There are pages of small illustrations for plants that are in season, showing details of their external features and internal structure that's visible in sections of stems.

This is a page for February, showing groundsel, white willow, oak, privet, elm, birch and laurel. For every species there is a page of description for the features you can expect to see with a hand lens.

Methods were simple, needing just a hand lens, a pair of self-closing forceps and a razor blade ....

... all of which I had lying around, so I took the book for a test-drive using lungwort Pulmonaria officinalis, which was flowering in the garden today.

Here's Small's drawing of the features to look out for and....

... here is the accompanying page of description

Sure enough, the two kinds of hairs on the flower stalk that he mentioned were there: stiff pointed ones on a pediment, that make the plant feel bristly, and shorter ones tipped with a gland that produces a slightly sticky secretion.

And here are the hairs in the corolla tube that he talks about. It may be that they help to deter small nectar thieves like ants, because ....

... here is the flower with the corolla removed, as he advises. That square of yellowish tissue is made up of the nectaries. 

Inside, at the base of the stigma and style, the four 'eggs' are the ovaries containing the ovules that will eventually become four black seeds, in an arrangement that is typical of the Boraginaceae, the family to which lungwort belongs.

What I really like about this book is that it's aimed at satisfying the natural curiosity that all children are born with.

I'm planning to produce an updated photographic version for my own grandchildren.