The Liverworts are "Blooming"!

We've had a few warm days and much to my delight the liverworts are starting to "bloom." To find them, be sure to look closely at fallen logs and mossy branches in the woods in the late winter and early spring (at least in the Puget Sound area).


Liverworts are not flowering plants, so they don't bloom in a literal sense. To reproduce they send up a structure called a sporophyte. Liverwort sporophytes can have many different shapes, but the ones that I've encountered are composed of a translucent, glassy stem (or seta) with a shiny black sporangium on top. The sporangium looks like an oval-shaped black pearl. The sporophytes look fungal; the colors seem so unlikely for plant structures. Some liverwort sporophytes look even more bizarre - like tiny lotus pods or alien parasols. I haven't found any of those species - yet!

I found this liverwort on Tiger Mountain (where the Nook Trail comes down onto the Tradition Plateau) last weekend, tangled among moss. The leaves you can see in the photo are the moss; the liverwort leaves were down underneath. I'm not sure about the identification; some leaves were unlobed, and others had two lobes. Possibly Lophocolea sp.? I brought a little home, which is how I discovered that most of the leaves I was seeing were moss leaves. As the sporophytes dried out in my house, they turned coppery-brown and opened up into four-pointed stars to release their spores. Hair-like structures called elaters help propel the spores outward as the sporangium opens.

My field journal page:


Resources:

A great resource for liverworts in the Pacific Northwest is Field Guide to the Liverwort Genera of Pacific North America, W.B. Schofield, Global Forest Society, 2002. Wonderful illustrations.  

The webinar from Washington Native Plant Society that got me hooked on liverworts in the first place: Introduction to Lichen and Bryophytes (bryophytes include mosses and liverworts).

Location: F2QQ+96 Mirrormont, WA, USA

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