What's going on everyone? Welcome back. As promised, we are back with mat of soil algae and today we're going to talk about

the similarities between algae and plants. So I think this is a piece of information that many people aren't familiar with or at least could build a little bit stronger knowledge about and so I figured I would bring it to you guys and I just am starting to get a little obsessed with algae I got to be honest with you

usually when I think about algae I think about it in the context of maybe a

hydroponic system you're trying to avoid it but we learn a lot about algae

in this podcast and once to come this week that make us think

Perhaps we should be really considering it as a soil additive or at least part of the web of organisms that exist within the soil and in a garden ecosystem.

So let's go ahead and talk about it. Here we are with Matt.

Right. Interesting. And I think that's a perfect time to move into talking about algae and plants. I think a lot of people don't understand or don't have a good enough understanding perhaps of what the differences are between those two types of life.

Yeah yeah so you know mainly it's funny because you know near the the current

philosophy is that all terrestrial plants arose from algae.

There's green algae which have chlorophyll A and B and all of our terrestrial plants have chlorophyll A and B as well.

So, you know, based upon a lot of that evidence and some genetic evidence as well, that's kind of

where they're going.

But the main differences that we're looking at are that algae of course is

submerged entirely in water. Some algae can go and live on land as well and of course on soil.

But also the whole algae thallis, the whole plant itself can do photosynthesis. Where terrestrial plants have some more specialized cells where you're going to have the leaf, the

stem, the roots, and the roots definitely don't do photosynthesis and some stems do.

Depends on whether you're getting into secondary tissue with the terrestrial plant.

And finally, and this is the one that I really like, and some of our aquatic algae are more

specialized and they actually have a part of the thallis called a hold fast and this looks a lot like a root structure in

in terrestrial plants and it functions somewhat similarly in that it grabs onto the ground.

But the difference kind of disperses there in as the roots or the holdfests holds on to the on to the ground in an aquatic system

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