(Permanently) noniridescent gametophyte morphospecies gets another glamour shot

 

I just love the way this morphospecies seems to be permanently solitary whenever it hasn't been injured in a way that makes it produce additional meristems.

Solitary specimens also seem to stop growing once they reach Harmonia axyridis size, but seemingly make no attempt to reproduce unless I slice them in half or otherwise injure them.

Perhaps these habits may imply that it isn't biologically adapted to having a long gametophyte lifespan and that my gametophytes only became longlived because they're a unisexual clone (in other words: I suspect that in the wild the gametophytes of this sp. quickly fertilize each other and then die of fertilization-induced programmed death, as is usual for ferns). I read in a paper somewhere that most if not all ferns develop unnaturally long-lived gametophytes if artificially prevented from producing a sporophyte, and that most if not all such gametophytes can be clonally propagated via fission.