Sporophytes and Gametophytes: The Double Life of Moss
Taught by Rae Winkelstein
Rae Winkelstein is a poet, editor, and teacher. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Rae studied botany and ecology during college and has worked as a botanical research assistant and landscape gardener.
Mosses are moisture-loving, non-vascular, spore-bearing plants with a fascinating life cycle. Their lineage split from that of flowering plants hundreds of millions of years ago, and their adaptive success has enabled them to become an extremely widespread group of land plants, with over twenty thousand modern species. Images of Middle Earth, Fern Gully, and Loch Lomond evoke the mystic pull of mossy worlds. So what is life like on the microscopic scale, in such worlds?
This class gives the curious non-botanist an introduction to mosses, zooming in on their evolutionary history and memorable reproductive technique. Let's just say if we did it that way, half of the humans on the earth would be colossal, many-armed giants made out of proto-gametes, and regular sized humans like us would grow off of their bodies.
Class material includes image slides and short video clips, and a look at some real local Brooklyn moss under magnification.
