Small marine critters ferry around seaweed sex cells, the first recorded example of “pollination” in algae
Life as a single seaweed along a rocky coastline can be tough. Though there are plenty of potential partners out there, stalks of these large algae are stuck in place, and possible mates often keep their reproductive structure hidden. For the red seaweed Gracilaria gracilis, which grows in scraggly clumps, this is a particular problem. Its male gametes, or spermatia, lack flexible flagella to propel them through the water.
To test the isopods’ suspected role in seaweed reproduction, Valero and her team collected stalks of Gracilaria from shorelines and dropped them into tanks meant to mimic the conditions of coastal rock pools at low tide, when the seaweeds do the bulk of their reproduction. In the first experiment, both male and female stalks were dangled in tanks with and without the isopods, which can grow to about the length of a AAA battery.
As isopods scuttle along a male seaweed stalk, they are bombarded by spermatia, which are coated in a tacky, mucuslike substance. Like a powder-coated bee spreading pollen from plant to plant, isopods spread spermatia throughout a tide pool as they travel between seaweed clumps. In exchange for their role as fertility nurses, the isopods use the seaweed for shelter and feast on a buffet of smaller algae stuck to the stalks.
“I suspect this is much more common in the sea than we think,” says Brigitta van Tussenbroek, a marine ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She was not involved in the new study but found in 2016 that marine seagrass plants are pollinated by creatures such as plankton. “There’s so little information about the sexual reproduction of sea plants and algae,” van Tussenbroek says.
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