All About Ferns!!!!
(At Five Tree Hill in Williston, VT)
During this entire week, I have been studying different ferns in the woodlands at Five Tree Hill in Williston Vermont. I have discovered that there are a lot of really interesting ferns in the forest!!! At first, all of the ferns looked the same. However, after many long minutes of staring at the same fern, I began noticing the qualities that make one fern distinguishable from another. On Tuesday I walked around and collected different species of fern (Or so I thought...) to analyze in the lab further on in the week. When I was finished, I proudly walked up to our leader Rick and showed him ALL of my different species. He looked at me and said, "This is great...but they are all the same species." What a letdown!!! However, it was also a very valuable learning experience for me, and now I can pick out all kinds of spinulose woodfern.
This is the picture we took today with the SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope).
We took a tiny image of a fern and magnified it seven hundered and fifty times by bombarding an image with electrons!
This is a picture of the sori on the underside of a fern.
So far I have identified marginal, christmas, New York, interrupted, sensitive, spinulose woodfern, rock polypody, and cinnamon fern.
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