 You don't have to go too far to spot a pteridophyte. Chances are there's one right outside in your garden or even inside your house, sitting there looking pretty. It's just that you might not have known that it's a pteridophyte. So, we're gonna fix that. In this video, we're gonna talk about pteridophytes and their entire life cycle. We'll explore their habitats, their structure and even how they reproduce. Pteridophytes are a group of seedless vascular plants that originated over 350 million years These plants include ferns, horse tails, ground pines, club mosses and more. Most of these plants are terrestrial and you will typically find them in abundance in moist and shaded places, like tropical forests, especially with the water in its vicinity. If you take a look at the life of a pteridophyte, you'll see that it exhibits both haploid and diploid phases, much like the bryophytes. But the main plant body, the one that you see right over here, is the sporophyte, which is the dominant and independent diploid stage of the teridophyte life cycle. Evolutionary speaking, the sporophyte became dominant for the very first time in teridophytes and it continued to remain dominant as the plants became more and more complex. Now, the structure of this sporophyte is quite fascinating. It is considerably large and prominent and shows the presence of true root stems and leaves. That means these root stems and leaves, they have vascular tissues in them. In fact, vascular tissues like xylem and phloem, they evolve for the very first time in teridophytes. Now, what are these tissues? Now, vascular tissues are specialized in such a way that they can conduct food and water throughout the entire plant. Xylem specifically conducts water and phloem conducts food. As the sporophyte matures, it develops these specialized leaves called sporophylls, which bear spore-producing structures called sporangia. Inside the sporangia, haploid spores are formed via meiosis. Now, most teridophytes have only one kind of sporangia, which produces only one type of spores or the same type of spores. Such plants are known to be homosporous. Some teridophytes, however, like selaginella, have two kinds of sporangia and they produce two different types of spores, microspores or the male spores and megaspores or the female spores. Such plants are said to be heterosporous. On maturity, these spores in both the cases are dispersed into the environment by wind, water or even animals. In ideal conditions, each spore divides mitotically and grows into the gametophyte, which is the haploid stage of the teridophyte life cycle. The gametophyte, also called the prothallium or prothallus, is really small and barely one centimeter in size. However, despite its size, it's completely independent just like the sporophyte. It can easily gather raw ingredients like water and minerals from the soil with the help of these thread-like structures called rhizoids. The gametophyte exclusively bears the sex organs of the plant. That means this stage is responsible for the production of the haploid gametes. Now, the spore from a homosporous plant will give rise to a bisexual gametophyte, meaning it will have both the male and the female sex organs. Meanwhile, the spore from a heterosporous plant will give rise to two different gametophytes. The male spore will give rise to a male gametophyte, which will have the male sex organ only. And the female spore will give rise to a female gametophyte, which will have the female sex organ only. The male sex organ, called the antheridium, produces flagellated male gametes called antherozoids. The female sex organ, called the archegonium, produces a single egg cell. To reach this egg cell, the antherozoids or male gametes require water, so that when they get released, they can swim all the way up to this egg cell and fertilize it. Once the fertilization is done, a zygote, a diploid zygote, is formed. This zygote then develops into an embryo, which further grows up to become the diploid sporophyte, completing the life cycle of the teridophyte. So to summarize everything, teridophytes are kind of like an in-between version of the bryophytes and the higher plants. Like bryophytes, teridophytes are also seedless, they produce spores and they need water to reproduce. But then they also have true root stems and leaves equipped with specialized vascular tissues, just like how the higher plants have. Teridophytes also do quite a lot for our environment. They are known to maintain soil health, regulate climate, fix nitrogen, provide habitat to a bunch of different living organisms and even promote biodiversity. So the next time you spot a fern in the wild, take a closer look at this ancient plant and appreciate the role it plays in our ecosystems.