A fern is a plant. A plant is supposed to get pollinated by bees and whatnot. Yet ferns have sperm swimming around and fertilizing the lady-bits of other fern.
Only flowering plants are pollinated by bees and even then not all of them. Ferns evolved before flowers existed so of course they need a different way to breed.
More interesting to me is that a full fern life cycle takes two generations to play out. A diploid (two sets of each chromosome) fern throws off spores, and the spores grow into haploid (one set of each chromosome) plantlets. The haploid plantlets fertilize each other, and boom, the offsping are diploid ferns.
Truly interesting, isn’t it? Even cooler is that more ‘modern’ flowering plants do the same thing, but they have truncated and miniaturized the haploid phase so it is completely dependent on the diploid sporophyte.
Don’t get me started on mosses. I have to go to work!
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