Searching for the sea fern

Ferns are weird, unlike flowering plants they don't use pollen to reproduce but both spores and sperm/ovules (it’s complicated they have a strange life cycle). These last ones are the key to their lifestyle, because sperm quickly dries out in the heat, ferns are restricted to areas of high humidity, with enough water for the sperm cells to swim through. 

You might hear that and think the beach is an ideal environment for these plants but, nope!

The sand and rock of coastline areas are terrible at retaining water making the beach an ironically dry, arid environment, on top of that the waves of salty seawater can carry away the sperm or, if it accumulates, kill them because of the high content in salt.  

Some species however, will take advantage of short lived puddles of rainwater (or other accumulations of fresh water) to quickly release their sperm reproduce, making them able to live where no other fern can even approach. One of these is the appropriately named sea fern (Asplenium marinum).

my man, my dawg, my brother

I think Asplenium marinum is, in scientific terms, a pretty cool guy. I found out about it on a website documenting coastal plants and have wanted to see one ever since. 

So, where do I find it? Do I just go through every beach hoping to see one? Well, no. Initially my idea was to look for observations of the species where I live (I’m from Tenerife in the Canary Islands), for that I used inaturalist, an app specifically for uploading photos of local fauna and flora, but to my surprise there are exactly 0 sightings of it in the Canaries, bummer.

This slight inconvenience made me completely forget about the search for a while but a recent find made while casually hanging out with a friend on the beach made me remember about it. 

We found another sea fern! an entirely different species (Adiantum capillus-veneris) but a sea fern, this motivated me to revive the search for Asplenium marinum, THE sea fern.

Adiantum capillus-veneris found in a cave right next to a popular beach, a pretty cool discovery really

So, there are no casual observations on inaturalist, but there’s always a plan B, that is, google the fucking thing + Canaries and see what pops up, and guess what, it worked! Turns out the banc of data on canary biodiversity (BIOTA) has a map specifying where in the island every species is found, convenient isn’t it?.

The map in question, cool stuff 

About 6 places where it has been documented, however a lot of this data comes from old studies (1904, kind of old) so it’s probably disappeared from a few of these places and on top of that i don’t know exactly where it’s found within these areas (there are some studies cited on the map which will probably help) but i’t a good start. 

So, my plan for the next few months (once I finish my goddamn exams) is to visit these areas and see what I can find, wish me luck!