Cinnamon Fern sporangia

More than a month ago, I wrote about spotting the first Cinnamon ferns, then hiding inside winter "jackets" and beginning to unroll from the ground in a tight coil known as a "fiddlehead." Not only is the unrolling process more or less complete—there are still late "bloomers" currently undergoing the process—but for most members of the Osmundastrum cinnamoneum clan, there's a new kind of growth form that is showing up. it's really hard to think of this curious spiky structure arising out of the middle of many a Cinnamon Fern clump as a kind of leaf, but botanists insist that it's simply a modification of the basic frond. However, it does exist for a very different purpose: this variation on the leaf theme is designed to carry spore containers known as sporangia. They're the little round cases you can see in the picture, and inside each one is a collection of dust-sized spores, the future of the species.