Walk a moss through its life.

Walk a moss life cycle step by step: spore, primary protonema, lateral bud, leafy gametophyte with sex organs, a water film for antherozoids, then the dependent sporophyte; a side branch shows Marchantia gemma cups making clones.

Get a fertilised egg by supplying just enough water, then name the first diploid structure.

The leafy moss plant is diploid; the bryophyte sporophyte is free-living.

• Liverworts grow in moist, shady spots: stream banks, marshy ground, damp soil, tree bark and deep in woods.
• A thalloid liverwort such as Marchantia has a dorsiventral thallus pressed flat against the ground. Leafy liverworts carry tiny leaf-like appendages in two rows on stem-like parts.
• Liverworts reproduce asexually by fragmentation of the thallus, or by gemmae (singular gemma): green, multicellular asexual buds formed in small cups, the gemma cups, on the thallus. Gemmae break off and grow into new plants.
• Male and female sex organs may be on one thallus or on separate thalli. The sporophyte has a foot, a seta and a capsule; spores form in the capsule after meiosis and grow into free-living gametophytes.
• In mosses the gametophyte is the main stage, and it has two parts. The protonema grows straight from a spore and is creeping, green, branched and often filamentous.
• The leafy stage grows as a lateral bud from the secondary protonema. It has upright, slender axes with spirally arranged leaves, held in the soil by multicellular, branched rhizoids, and it carries the sex organs.
• Mosses reproduce vegetatively by fragmentation and by budding in the secondary protonema. Antheridia and archegonia form at the tips of the leafy shoots.
• After fertilisation the zygote forms a sporophyte of foot, seta and capsule, more elaborate than a liverwort's. Spores form in the capsule after meiosis, and mosses have an elaborate way of dispersing them. Examples: Funaria, Polytrichum, Sphagnum.

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