Talk:Hornwort

Im not sure...

...if the pic

• 
  pic that was in the article

really shows a hornwort. Id rather say it was a thallus of a liverwort. greetings --Oliver s. 10:02, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

(i put back that very pic here because we now have the same problem discussed on wp commons and i want to put a link between the two hornwort discussions. The pic here just makes it easier to understand what is talekd about.--Oliver s. 23:36, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

:I would not call it a hornwort if

I had not seen sporangial structures, but at this moment I cannot (from my photos) find a similar thallus with sporangia. I'll keep looking. I would have thought it more resembles a liverwort myself, so something I saw convinced me otherwise. - Marshman 18:28, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hi Marshman, thank you

for answering so quickly. Someone has posted your pic in the german wp. Thats why i found this article here. We debaded about your pic in the german wp and found out that you first loaded the pic as liverwot. As a result we thought it was just a mistake that its name was changed to hornwort. So i went out in the "Odenwald" today and took a pic of a european hornwort. You can find it in the german wp if you like:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornmoose

But i dont doubt that your pic shows a hornwort aswell, if you say you found convincing arguments for that :-)

Greetings --Oliver s. 21:33, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Actually I do have a Hawai‘i picture of a hornwort that looks much like that one. I'll see if it is clearer. If not (and it is not a super clear picture like the one being debated), I'll not use it and try the German one. At the time I took the picture under debate, I assumed it was a liverwort. However, something I encountered later on convinced me otherwise. - Marshman 23:31, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Im not sure,

if we should call a hornwort a "horned liverwort". greetings --Oliver s. 16:50, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

That would only add confusion, I believe;although once upon a time the hornworts may have been considered liverworts, so that name may have been used. - Marshman 18:25, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Image change

i have been working on making the life cycle for the moss the liverwort and the hornwort. i am not an expert but i have seen tons of pictures from the tree on this last weeks and i would swear that of the pic in this page is a liverwort. now this seems to be a common mistake. i have seen many pages having one for the other. yet i will try to explain the main diferences and why i base my case. first hornworst leaves are of a more rounded form with "ondulated edges" like in this image hornworts are more thin, with a thiker midle part wich is the one called tallus, like you can see on this and this electron miscoscope images.

second the fact that there are no reproductive structures visible. for wich the hornwort gets its name like in this and this picture

third On this page about the plants on hawaii. if you scroll down you will see two pictures one of a liverworth and one of a hornwort and deside wichone is looks more similar to wich picture.

against this 3 point there is the fact that on this page you will find exactly the same picture. and yet after have seen many people using the moss life cycle saying is a liverwort i can admit it is not waranty.

based on all this i would sugest to change the picture for the one found on the german wikipedia. on here .LadyofHats 14:09, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

It WAS a liverwort pic

The picture that was on the page was indeed a liverwort, class Marchantiales. Fortunately, the German edition of the page linked to an uploaded hornwort picture (Hornmoose), so a simple switch was possible. Without reproductive structures, I'm not sure I could tell the genus of the liverwort, though the hornwort is easy since the thallus is smooth and it's making yellow spores. Those are give-away traits for Phaeoceros.

Is there anyone here writing text for this page, or just working on images? Liverwort and hornwort biology was the area of my doctoral work, so I could probably get in a few good paragraphs with references rather quickly. Good images are the only things I wouldn't be able to provide. Hornworts just aren't very photogenic. --EncycloPetey 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Like all pages at Wikipedia, have at it! But your input is especially needed here I suspect. Was that my picture you were confirming as mislabeled? - Marshman 02:23, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Yes. It was the one titled 'hornwort.jpg', and it was some genus of Marchantiales. I couldn'r tell for sure without reproductive structures which family it belongs to, but it's probably a species of Targionia or else something in the Aytoniaceae. --EncycloPetey 14 October 2005

Illustration mislabelled?

I am just an ordinary Joe trying to understand this subject. I read the article and thought I understood, then looked at the illustration and got confused again. It shows that the low, flat structure is the gametophyte phase. Good. Then it shows that the two 'horns' that grow out of it are also the gametophyte phase, while the text says these are the sporophyte phase. Am I reading the text correctly? If so, does anyone know how to get the illustration revised? 130.76.96.19 17:40, 5 October 2006 (UTC)Sinewi

You are correct. Where the diagram says "Gametophyte" and points to the two slender structures, the diagram should say "Sporophyte instead. I helped proof this diagram and should have noticed that problem. --EncycloPetey 05:16, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

• I did the illustration on the bottom, with the life circle. your confusion seems to come from the word "Phase" there is no phase division on the illustration, what is called gametophyte there means actually only sexual organs. and the diference between the two phases is between the plant exchanging sperm, and the plant denveloping spores ( just after the first) please apologise my lausy english.LadyofHats 20:01, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
• Thank you very much for the explanation. The illustration is very nice and your English is perfect

Hi - I too got a wee bit confused by the drawing so I'm assuming the long pieces were indeed the sporophyte structure - it would be great if you could get that picture changed to avoid further confusion. Alternation of generations is hard enough to understand! Also technically the illustration is a little confusing becuse it doesn't really show a cycle as such, it's more like a labelled diagram of a Hornwart. However I really appreciate the effort as there is very little information out there on the life cycle of hornworts.

Monoicous and dioicous

I have reverted your edit to Hornwort. The terms monoicous and Monecious do not mean the same thing. Bryophytes may be either monoicous or dioicous, meaning that their gametangia may be located either on the same or separate gametophytes. Bryophytes are never monecious or dioecious (with two kinds of sporangia located on the same or separate sporophyte), because all bryophytes have a single kind of sporangium. --EncycloPetey 13:18, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Um... There is indeed a useful distinction between these terms, but actually many if not most works on bryophytes do use mon(o)ecious/dioecious rather than monoicous/dioicous. I ran a Google search for "dioecious moss" and got 1,940 hits, whereas "dioicous moss" got only 303. You'll find academic papers up to 2009 using "dioecious". So we must be careful of POV here: in the interests of clear terminology, I like the distinction, but it doesn't reflect actual usage. Byologists continue to use monoecious/dioecious (I suspect precisely because they don't need different terms for both the sporophyte and gametophyte generations). I felt obliged to put in a qualification when I re-wrote Alternation_of_generations#Variations. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:51, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Google searches are neither unbiased nor independent. Yes, the terms are not used consistently, and the distinction is important. It is also surpising to many botanists that there is a difference. The Flora of North America consistently uses "dioicous"/"monoicous"/etc. in volume 27 (Mosses, part 1). Other major publications, such as Bryophyte Biology do the same. The trend is therefore towards using the more precise term. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:54, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

We don't disagree about the distinction and the desirability of the trend (if it exists). However, even with all the caveats about Google searches, it's relevant that Google scholar shows more papers published since 2000 using the term "dioecious moss" than "dioicous moss" (33 to 20). If you claimed in an article that there was a trend to using the more precise term, I would challenge you to support this. My real point, which I hope you will accept, is that whatever you or I want, at present there is not a firm consensus among academic bryologists to use monoicous/dioicous. I support your reversion, which started this discussion, but in article space we must be careful not to imply that the usage reflects a clear consensus among bryologists; Wikipedia readers are entitled to know that many sources discussing bryophytes do not at present use the terms you and I prefer. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:11, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

But explicitly discussing such inconsistent terminology would lengthen almost every article. Most bryologists say that mosses have stems and leaves, but many botanists insist on expressing those terms in quotations when discussing bryophytes, or to use the alternative terms caulidia and phyllidia. Many field guides discuss the "fruiting times" of mosses, which have no fruit. And there are many, many, many more situations like this covering terminology in almost every aspect of bryology. An encyclopedia should not try to present every piece of information in every way that it is possible to do so. It should be clear. Implying consensus is never as great a problem as confusing the reader. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:36, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm continuing this discussion because this is genuinely one of the areas which I find personally a problem when editing on Wikipedia. Your background and mine are both as teachers. A good teacher always prioritizes clarifying topics, and almost always has to be very selective because of time constraints. A good encyclopedia article is not a piece of teaching material, and those of us used to writing the latter need, I think, to be especially careful when writing the former. Implying a consensus when it is not present *is* a serious error in an encyclopedia article, as of course is confusing the reader. However, I don't think that there should ever be a trade-off between these two. We need to do both: be clear and also convey an accurate sense of the consensus or lack of it. I know that I sometimes fall into "teaching" when I write on Wikipedia (how could I not after a lifetime of doing it!); one thing editors need to do for each other is to watch for this and help to correct it. If I were teaching botany I would certainly make clear my preference for precise terminology and try to get students to use it (as I used to when teaching linguistics to computer scientists). But this isn't what Wikipedia should do. I'm certainly not arguing for lengthening articles by discussions of inconsistent terminology in every relevant article. The best solution is perhaps to make sure that a 'main article' covers actual usage in as neutral way as possible, and then in articles which use one particular terminology for clarity, ensure there is a "see also" reference to the main article. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:58, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Description

In the description section, would it be beneficial to mention how hornwort morphology differs from that of mosses and liverworts to avoid confusion? Also, would it be helpful to add an ecology section? Shelby234 (talk) 17:45, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

Probably not; there are almost no similarities in morphology. It would be like adding a section to the article on Birds describing how they are different from Whales. An ecology section would be useful, however, the literature on hornwort ecology is scanty and scattered. It would take even an expert a very long time to assemble a meaningful set of references and information. Most articles are extremely narrow and specialized; several genera have little or no published ecological information; and the tropical taxa (there are many) have usually been neglected in favor of taxa that grow in the US or Europe. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:48, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

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inconsistent/maybe wrong

wiki page on moss says hornwarts are not in the bryophyte category anymore. idk who to trust. reporting bc i like wikipedia but don't have the time to figure this out and fix it at the moment so sorry JoshOzburn (talk) 13:31, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

It is slightly confusing. Hornworts are now treated as a division (equivalent to a phylum) of plants called Anthocerotophyta. Informally, the group bryophytes is still used for hornworts, mosses and liverworts, but each of these is now considered to be a separate phylum. Confusingly, the formal name for mosses is Bryophyta. Plantsurfer 13:49, 13 April 2021 (UTC)