The team also set up tanks with just female algae and isopods exposed to male algae earlier. When isopods were present, fertilization success was about 20 times as high as in their absence. By counting cystocarps, the team quantified how many spermatia were reaching and fertilizing the female algae. When a successful fertilization occurs on the body of a female red algae, it creates a bubblelike structure called a cystocarp. Some tanks also included the centimeters-long Idotea balthica, a type of isopod crustacean, while others didn’t. In the lab, the researchers placed male and female algae 15 centimeters apart in tanks with no water movement. A new study finds that the isopods spread the algae’s sex cells, aiding reproduction. This discovery and the similarity of the algae’s spermatia to pollen led the team to wonder if the crustaceans help “pollinate” the algae.Ĭrustaceans called Idotea balthica move from a male red alga to a female one. After collecting samples of the seaweed and storing them in laboratory tanks, the team kept noticing hundreds of small, oblong crustaceans in the tanks. ![]() In the new study, Myriam Valero, a population geneticist at the Sorbonne University in Paris, and her colleagues were studying the genetics and mating of G. Called spermatia, its sex cells were typically thought to be dispersed to female algae by the flow of water, much like how wind can spread pollen to fertilize certain land plants. ![]() Like other red algae, Gracilaria gracilis doesn’t have free-swimming male sex cells. ![]() But nothing similar had yet been documented in algae. Then in 2016, researchers discovered that various marine invertebrates “pollinate” seagrass flowers by feeding on and moving between the gelatinous pollen masses of seagrasses, which are descended from land plants. Pollination typically describes the transfer of male sex cells - pollen - to a female flower, usually on land.
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