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Heterospory is the production of spores of two different sizes and sexes by the sporophytes of land plants. The smaller of these, the microspore , is male and the larger megaspore is female. Heterospory evolved during the Devonian period from isospory independently in several plant groups: the clubmosses , the ferns including the arborescent ...
Spores of two distinct sizes (heterospory or anisospory): larger megaspores and smaller microspores. When the two kinds of spore are produced in different kinds of sporangia, these are called megasporangia and microsporangia. A megaspore often (but not always) develops at the expense of the other three cells resulting from meiosis, which abort.
During the Devonian period several plant groups independently evolved heterospory and subsequently the habit of endospory, in which the gametophytes develop in miniaturized form inside the spore wall. By contrast in exosporous plants, including modern ferns, the gametophytes break the spore wall open on germination and develop outside it.
In the homosporous families Lycopodiaceae and Huperziaceae, spores germinate into bisexual free-living, subterranean and mycotrophic gametophytes that derive nutrients from symbiosis with fungi. In Isoetes and Selaginella , which are heterosporous, microspores and megaspores are dispersed from sporangia either passively or by active ejection. [ 8 ]
There is debate as to whether endospory or heterospory evolved first. Some debate centers upon the requirement of endospory to develop before heterospory. [2] Endospory is assumed to follow heterospory but it has been suggested that without endospory, early plant species dependency on water fertilization and environmental impacts on gametophytic gene expression would have reduced the chances ...
Heterospory evolve independently and convergently several times in different plant groups. The herbaceous Lycopodiales of today are homosporous, but their extinct arborescent relatives such as Lepidodendron were heterosporous. Bateman and DiMichele in the title of an influential paper described it as "the most iterative key innovation in the ...
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Heterosporous plants that produced microspores in microsporangia and megaspores in separate megasporangia evolved independently in several plant groups during the Devonian period. [ 1 ] Fossils of these plants show that they produced endosporic gametophytes, meaning that their gametophytes were not free-living as in bryophytes but developed ...