Look’it those bivalents!

Julia has officially leveled-up to Chromosome Counter Extraordinaire! You can see the chromosomes! In the cell! With your eye! How cool is that???

Julia counts 81 chromosome pairs/bivalents/tetrads. So since the base number of chromosomes in Cystopteris is x=42, there are presumably 84 pairs present, meaning that this plant it is a tetraploid. Thank you to Mike Windham and James Beck for helping us continue the cytological dark arts!