 Our next group of critters are ferns and they get these water tubes. And you can think of it as they're called vascular plants because they have like blood tubes. Your blood vessels make up your vasculature and that's just the tubing that carries stuff around in your body. Same function, water tubes in a plant. What about a tree? How would a tree, I mean trees have roots and they suck water in through their roots and then they take that water all the way up to their leaves at the very top of our very tall redwood trees. It's because they have water tubes that they can do that. A moss could never get that big because it could never carry water anywhere. Ferns, so I'm going to make my little branch here. These are my ferns. Ferns are also known as turidophytes. The ferns still need water to make their babies. So they can totally, they can get bigger. They can live in drier areas but if they want to make babies, they have to have rain or some kind of wet flood that will allow their sperm to swim and find the eggs and have it all be good. Okay, I want to show you a picture of a fern because guess what? The mosses, the big part of the moss was the gametophyte. In a fern, the big part of the fern that you see, the part that you're familiar with, that's actually the sporophyte. That's a diploid critter right here. This would be an awesome test question showing you a fern that you're comfortable and familiar with and asking you is this haploid or diploid? You know that it's the sporophyte so it must be diploid. Now this thing, what is that thing? That little thing is a baby gametophyte. Actually, that is a fern gametophyte. They don't get bigger than that. They're just little tiny floppy things and they've got some roots but this is a haploid critter. This haploid critter makes gametes that grow into the fern. So I don't know if you ever looked at the bottom of a fern. Sometimes you see all those little dots on the bottom of the fern, like they're kind of brownish, dusty dots. When we go on our field trip, we'll see if we can find some. Those are all spores. Those aren't seeds, those aren't eggs, those are spores. Each one of those, if you planted it, it would grow. You'd be like, dude, where's my fern? Because it's going to grow into a little floppy thing that you're going to think, what is this algae that's growing in my fern plant area? And it's actually the gametophyte. The gametophyte will then produce the gametes that combine and form the sporophyte that you are familiar with. So I think it's kind of an interesting thing. Now, we're about to look at the next critter on the list. The next one has an extremely reduced gametophyte, like even more reduced than this thing. Let's go learn about it.