# Hair-like growth on my pillow moss



## crazygh0st8 (Aug 15, 2017)

Ive noticed these strange growths popping up on most of my pillow moss. Anyone know what they are?









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## Sammie (Oct 12, 2009)

They are called sporophytes, what they do is they produce spores. Sort of like a rudimentary flower.


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## kimcmich (Jan 17, 2016)

@Sammie,@Crazy - 

The sporophytes are very different than rudimenatry flowers - but they do serve a similar _purpose_ as they are both reproductive structures. Sporophytes come after moss's analog of the flower, the gametangia. The gametangia are the structures that, like flowers in higher plants, produce eggs and sperm.

The coolest thing about mosses (also true of liver and horn worts) is that they "elaborate" a different part of their lifecycle than higher plants (ferns and seed plants):

In higher plants (and in most animals including humans), the bulk of the organism is diploid (has pairs of chromosomes). When you look at a higher plant or a person what you see is 100% diploid. Only a microscopic, short-lived part of the organism is haploid (having unpaired chromosomes) - these are the egg and sperm cell that unite to create an embryo (making it diploid again).

In mosses, by contrast, the bulk of the organism is haploid. The green cushion in your image is 100% haploid - the only diploid parts are the sporophytes - the tiny "threads" you were originally asking about. The cushion can live and grow for decades whereas the sporophytes live a few weeks.

The analogy is not perfect - but if humans were to reproduce like mosses, our eggs and sperm would grow to the size of people and only then would they start to produce finger-sized adults humans who could not live independently and would survive just long enough to release more egg and sperm.

Life is wacky!


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## goober17 (Nov 18, 2017)

kimcmich said:


> The analogy is not perfect - but if humans were to reproduce like mosses, our eggs and sperm would grow to the size of people and only then would they start to produce finger-sized adults humans who could not live independently and would survive just long enough to release more egg and sperm.
> 
> Life is wacky!


Yeesh...


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