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An Aquatic Plant That Bloomed Underwater Was Among First Flowering Plants
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoBoy, that site is awful on an iPad. The margins are so wide, it’s like reading a pencil. I was watching a documentary, awhile back, that said the first flowering plants were underwater plants. I don’t remember the exact age. That indicates that the idea that flowering plants started underwater, isn’t new. Another fairly recent (geologically) plant, is grass. Whenever you see artistic depictions of dinosaurs, grazing in fields of grass, it’s not really accurate. I think ferns may have filled the “ground cover” niche, back then.
- r00fus 5y agoI feel nostalgic when I see formatting complaints, as my defaults on iOS are to put all sites on "reader mode" unless whitelisted. Annoying sometimes but almost never have formatting issues.
- ginko 5y agoThe thought that the first flowering plants crossed to land only some 200M+ years after the first vertebrate is absolutely fascinating.
- ivanhoe 5y agoInteresting because today the majority of aquatic plants are actually immersed growers, or plants that live part of the season under the water and part out of it. Fully under the water you can find mostly algae.
- bradrn 5y agoPaper: https://www.pnas.org/content/112/35/10985 https://www.pnas.org/content/112/35/10985. Note that the paper comes to a slightly different conclusion than this summary article: in particular, it never claims that Montsechia might be ‘the original flowering plant’ as the article does, nor does it say that Ceratophyllum is a modern-day descendant of Montsechia (in fact, it says quite the opposite).
- pvaldes 5y agoReminds me more like a member of Charophyta, that are algae but I'm not expert in prehistory plants and I could be wrong.
- hammock 5y agoHow would a flower get pollinated underwater? All of the aquatic plants I can think of float their flowers on the surface for pollination - even eelgrass, which technically flowers underwater (https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2019/8/14/eelgrass-sex-is-strange https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2019/8/14/eelgrass-se...)
- pvaldes 5y agoIs the same as being pollinated by air currents
- kadoban 5y agoSeems weird that most (all?) modern aquatic plants lost that ability then. Certainly not impossible by any means, but still weird. Does that mean anything, for example did all/most aquatic plants die off and terrestrial plants move back to the water later?
- pvaldes 5y agoAquatic plants have different goals. Most of them are aggressively clonal and flowering is just one possible strategy to compete For underwater pollination, well, we assume that Posidonia is pollinated by water currents but there is an huge number of things that we still don't know about sea ecosystems.
- hammock 5y agoNo offense, but I don't believe you. Can you cite a plant that gets pollinated underwater? Or are you suggesting that this ancient plant also pollinated above the water (as in the case of the eelgrass example I provided)?
- pvaldes 5y agoYes, there are plants that are pollinated underwater, of course. You don't need to believe me, just use the bibliography available.