Ferns

Hi! I am Stefanie and I did some major fern studying up at the Five Tree Hill site in Williston, Vermont. I learned about sooooooooo many different kinds of ferns it was insane!!!

Here is a list of the ferns I spotted up at Five Tree Hill:

-Spinulose Woodfern (in all of its many flavors...)

-Interrrupted fern

-Sensitive fern

-Rock Polypody

-New York fern (it burns at both ends!!)

-Marginal Fern

-Christmas Fern (still green on December 25th!!)

-Cinnamon fern (the reproductive stage of this species has a very cinnamony color)

Some different types of the spinulose woodfern have these REALLY cool dots on the bottom of them. These dots are called sori.

Discovering the sori is definitely awesome, and better yet, when you look at it under a microscope, or the cool hand lenses the Governor's Institute provided us with, you find a special treat. Underneath the small, flat membrane coverning the sori, there are lots and lots of sporangia!!!!! When these sporangia are fully developed, they literally throw their spores out into nature. This is the spinulose ferns way of reproducing, making thousands of new baby spinulose ferns!!! Actually, no, that is wrong. Since there are millions and billions of sporangia on one fern, and since they are so delicate, only a small number of spores are actually ejected.

Here is an AWESOME picture of the sori on a Spinulose fern. This picture was taken with the SEM, a cool piece of machinery that costs seventy thousand dollars. SEM stands for Scanning Electron Microscope.

I then decided to pick three or four ferns and take soil samples from their location to test in the geology lab. In the lab, I took the pH of all of the different types of soil. I then massed wet samples of the soil in plastic bags, and placed them in the drying oven.

Fern Sample	Initial Mass (kg)	Final Mass (kg)	pH
Spinulose Woodfern	.041	.028	4.5
Spinulose Woodfern	.044	.027	4.8
Spinulose Woodfern	.062	.040	4.2
Spinulose Woodfern	.071	.056	4.6
Cinnamon Fern	.055	.040	6.1
Spinulose Woodfern	.016	.010	5.4
Marginal Fern	.032	.024	4.9

Here we are studying the ferns.

Here we are at the Vernal Pool, with the Fern Lady herself walking towards us.