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Mosses in Malaysia

My pal Robin (botanist turned geographer) is off working on her PhD in Malaysia for the next 9 months and she sent me this photo of some bright green mosses.


I can't identify it at this magnification, so Robin suggested that I come to identify them in person. I think that a trip to Malaysia sounds like a great idea, but the lab work here in Connecticut is much more pressing at the moment. Maybe I can do some world traveling the summer after I finish up my PhD. I will put in on my wish list of places to visit.

In other moss news from the region I located this website entitled the Malesian Moss Handbook. This website is a work in progress and their goal is to produce an online identification aid to the mosses of the Malesian archipelago (Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Papua). I think that it is a great idea to make content such as this available to the public on the web. Only publishing identification keys/guides in a hard-back book can make accessing the information in them expensive to impossible.

3 comments:

  1. This is Calymperes, I think I can discern some leaf tips with gemmae (specialized structure for asexual reproduction)-- those dark ones. I am guessing perhaps C. erosum or C. graeffeanum.

    BC

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good eyes! I can see the darkened areas at the tips of the leaves, now that you point them out. Thanks for the comment!

    ReplyDelete

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