Moss Express: Insects and mites tote mosses’ sperm
By Susan Milius
After more than a century of speculation by biologists, a lab test has shown that mosses have their own animal-courier system for sperm that’s similar to pollination, researchers say.
Mosses don’t package their male gametes in pollen, as flowers do, but rely instead on swimming sperm. Textbooks state that moss sperm need to swim or splash to a female moss tuft. However, an experiment with a common moss species shows that sperm hitchhike on mites and tiny insects, says Nils Cronberg of Lund University in Sweden.