Bumping into Bryophytes in Literature

It always amuses me when I bump into bryophytes when reading, especially when it is my recreational fiction reading. It is pretty common for mosses to be described as part of the background scenery, such as 'The lush verdant forest was covered in a layer of soft moss'. Mosses are also used as part of a survival strategy either as an insulating layer to keep warm or an absorptive padding to pack a wound. Using mosses for wound care is not a fictional idea, but was actually a practice in World War I. Sphagnum mosses are highly absorptive and have antimicrobial properties, which make them ideal for this purpose. But I digress.

Recently I finished reading Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam trilogy and came across the passage pictured here. The Festival of Bryophyta-the-Moss! I was super excited, because The Festival of Cnidaria (jellyfish) was described in such amazing detail with the costumes, games, and even a play about the jellyfish lifecycle! It is a biologist's dream to have festivals focused around different lineages of organisms! Unfortunately I don't think that Atwood consulted with a bryophyte expert, because the above quote is it. A shout out to bryophytes without additional elaboration. No play of the moss lifecycle regaling us with the alternation of phases. I can see it now, in interpretive dance format. The moss emerging from a little spore to begin its life on the moist soil...

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Taking the moss life cycle into a visual format using people could have made for some great imagery. Instead you can check out the video here for a take on the life cycle with all the stages explained. If you are in to post-apocalyptic tales I would highly recommend the MaddAdam trilogy for your next literary adventure. 

A Science Communication Activity on Birds and Bryophytes

Have you ever played the telephone game? In this game a phrase is whispered from one person to another with the players trying to repeat the phrase exactly the same. By the time the phrase makes it to the other end of the line it is often altered, sometimes dramatically so. The same can also happen to research as it is transmitted from a peer-reviewed scientific article to the popular media, such as a magazine or newspaper. One explanation for alterations to the research story is that scientists use language with lots of jargon and scientists often use many words that are qualifiers. Qualifiers are words that limit or enhance the meaning of another word. Most often when scientists use them it is to explain the scope and limits of their findings. All-in-all the language of science is significantly different from the language the news media uses to communicate with the public and the weight that is given to different terms and phrases varies between the two.

I think that science communication is an important concept for students who are training to be scientists to both ponder and explore. Thus I developed a team-based learning activity to walk students through the exploration of a scientific research article and the news media reporting on the findings. The main learning objectives of this exercise are for students to: 

-   Analyze the transmission of information from scientific publication to news media.

-   Identify absolute versus qualified statements.

-   Differentiate different organisms from bryophytes.

An additional goal of this exercise was to introduce students, potentially for the first time, to a scientific research article. Reading peer-reviewed research from beginning to end can be intimidating for science students. This activity has students explore the research article for information to compare to the news articles, resulting in students both learning how to find information in scientific papers and how to ground-truth science that is reported in the media.  

If you are interested in trying out this activity with your students I posted the materials that you will need online, via Google Drive. Included in the materials is a detailed lesson plan, as well as a pre- and post- assessment (with a key) to measure student learning from the activity. Alternatively this activity can be modified to focus on any scientific paper from your field that has been covered in multiple news articles. 

The article that I used for this exercise was a publication studying whether migrating birds may be responsible for moving pieces of bryophytes from northern arctic regions to the far southern reaches of South America. 

The research article can be downloaded for free at the link below. 

Lily R. Lewis, Emily Behling, Hannah Gousse, Emily Qian, Chris S. Elphick, Jean-Francois Lamarre, Joel Bety, Joe Liebezeit, Ricardo Rozzi, and Bernard Goffinet. 2014. First evidence of bryophyte diaspores in the plumage of transequatorial migrant birds. PeerJ 2:e424; DOI 10.7717/peerj.424

The news articles covering this research are at BBC Nature News, Audubon Magazine, Science Magazine, UConn Today, and Alaska Dispatch News.

If you use this activity with your students, it would be great to hear your thoughts about the exercise in the comments section below the post!

Mosses and the American Dipper

Mosses around the edge of the nest

The American Dipper is an aquatic songbird that captures all of its food underwater in fast flowing streams. The other interesting thing about these birds is that they use mosses in their nest construction. Last week I got to see some of them along the Payette River in Idaho. Some nests have mosses around the edge with the main body made from twigs, whereas others are roofed nests completely made of mosses. 

A nest made completely of mosses
underneath a bridge.

when I was in Idaho last week. 

Below are some additional views from the American Bryological and Lichenological Society fieldtrip into the hills of Idaho. 

A view of the Idaho hills

The Payette River

An American Dipper nest was
spotted on this rock jutting out
into the river. I took a photo,
but couldn't spot from the shore.

Everyone wants to be called a Moss

There are plants that we call mosses that are not really mosses. Spanish moss (in the pineapple family), clubmosses (a fern friend), and carrageen moss (a red alga that is used in foods as a thickening agent). I like to call them mossy misnomers. Their common names include the term moss, but really they are not bryophytes nor do they look much like them. However, this stick insect is worthy of his mossy moniker. It is camouflaged to look like a moss and is doing an amazing job!

Trychopeplus laciniatus - Moss mimic stick insect
Photo by dandoucette on Project Noah

Crawling along on a moss covered tree the frills blend in with the surrounding moss making it hard for predators to spot this stick insect. Check out some of the great photos posted on Project Noah for this insect and many others. Thanks to my labmate Ciera Martinez for sending me this photo!     

Trychopeplus laciniatus on a moss-covered tree
Photo by dandoucette on Project Noah

An Ecotourism Vacation

The end of the school year has me thinking about summer vacations and I have just added a new location to my vacation wish list. The Cape Horn region of southern Chile and Argentina sounds like an amazing place to visit! The area has high levels of bryophyte diversity and a beautiful landscape of waterways and islands. Unfortunately my summer vacation plans do not include the Cape Horn this year. Instead I have been reading a book all about ecotourism of the miniature forests and imagining myself there. 

Miniature Forests of Cape Horn: Ecotourism with a Hand Lens (2012) by Bernard Goffinet, Ricardo Rozzi, Lily Lewis, William Buck, and Francisca Massardo.

This book makes it easy to imagine you are far away in the Cape Horn. There are many full color photos of the landscape and a up close photos of the plants. They also identify the many species of mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichen that live in the Cape Horn region. The book has text in both English and Spanish, as you can tell from the cover. 

For some of the species they describe interesting structures, such as the lamellae on the leaves of the Polytrichaceae.

For others, cool interactions, such as the flies that are attracted to moss capsules and disperse the sticky spores are featured.

Overall I think that it is a great book. I may be a little biased since I know two of the authors quite well (Goffinet was my PhD advisor and Lewis was my labmate at the University of Connecticut). I think that the book is a great outreach tool and I hope that many people will take them up on visiting the area to see the amazing miniature plants. 

Spore Dispersal by Snakes

I tend to avoid snakes in life in general, but this snake is having a super cool interaction with a moss. If you look closely, it appears that this smooth earthsnake is covered in moss spores!

Close-up of the snake's head.

Close-up of the bright green spores coming out of the moss capsule. 

What do you think? I think that they look like spores on the snake. How long will they stick or how far can the snake go without them falling off? Easy to guess, hard to measure.  Probably a little ways, maybe further depending on how quickly they dry and the cover of plants the snake is crawling through. I think that spore dispersal by animals is a very interesting phenomenon and is under documented in the literature. Have a favorite spore dispersing creature or photos you would like to share?

Thanks to Tobias Landberg, a postdoctoral researcher at Murray State University in Kentucky, for taking and sending me these photos.

Poop - Where Bryologists and Ornithologists Overlap

We read a paper last week in lab group about goose poop. Yes this is still a blog about about bryophytes and I am going to write about poop today.

M. Stech, E. Kolvoort, M. J. J. E. Loonen, K. Vrieling and J. D. Kruijer. 2011. Bryophyte DNA sequences from faeces of an arctic herbivore, barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis). Molecular Ecology Resources 11: 404–408.

In this paper, the goal was to optimize a methodology for extracting bryophyte DNA from the poop/faeces of the barnacle goose. Then they use the DNA to identify the different bryophyte species that the birds had eaten. It is pretty amazing that they were able to identify the mosses from the goose poop using DNA. I think that this sounds much better than digging through the poop trying to identify the bryohytes from small pieces of leaves.

I ran into a bunch of the ornithologists (the folks who study birds) who work in my department and we had a fun discussion about all the possibilities for studying bird poop and the plant contents of the poop. 

It made me think about the Science Communication seminar that I have taken and the book Don't be Such a Scientist that we read a couple of years back. One of the ideas in the book is that that there are several ways to appeal to an audience when communicating science. Intellect - Feeling - Humor - Sex. I think that bodily functions, including poop, could be added in too. Poop is definitely a topic for communicating science that appeals to everyone. Ok maybe appeals is the wrong word. But it is definitely a process everyone can relate to, whereas studying mosses can at times be a little esoteric.

I thought that it was a really fun paper and good science too!

Mosses Grow on a New Substrate. Whale!

Mosses grow on all sorts of substrates. Soil, tree bark, leaves, rocks, sand, dung, old socks abandoned in the woods, and now a whale! My labmates were out visiting the Seymour Marine Discovery Center at Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz, California over spring break and they brought back these photos of some Funaria hygrometrica (cord mosses) growing on a whale skeleton outside of the center. When they first told me that they found mosses growing on a whale I totally did not believe them, but I was imagining a breathing swimming whale. They even got permission from the Marine Center to collect some of the moss for us to use in our research collection. The description of this collection location on the label is going to be great! Thanks Laura and Juan Carlos for the photos.

You can read more about 'Ms. Blue' the whale here on the Marine Center's website. She has a pretty interesting story that goes from finding a blue whale washed up on the shore to her most recent relocation.

Happy April Fools Day!

Camouflaged Critters

Here is an article about animals with amazing powers of camouflage! One of them included in the lineup is a leaf-tailed gecko that is hiding on a moss and liverwort covered tree trunk. Here is the link to the article and photos. 

When hunting for mosses I am often focused on a very specific search image. Crawling along the ground or kneeling in the moss I am usually very focused on the plants and often miss seeing the surrounding animals. My biggest fear when hunting for mosses is that I will run into a snake resulting in starting and scaring us both. I have run into snakes now and again when doing fieldwork. Fortunately I have always seen them with enough time and distance to avoid a dramatic meeting. 

Thanks again Kathryn for the article!

Mosses in Malaysia

Well I sure had a whirl-wind adventure traveling around southeast asia for 2.5 weeks. The itenary was as follows. I flew from New York to Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur to northern Borneo (then back), Kuala Lumpur to Java (then back), I stayed put in Kuala Lumpur for a few days, and then home to Connecticut.

My favorite part of the trip was Northern Borneo. We were in Sabah, Malaysia near the town of Sandakan. We roomed at the Sepilok Jungle Resort, and I thought that it was a nice place to stay despite the poor review it was given in the most recent Lonely Planet Malaysia. We visited the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center and the Rainforest Discovery Centre, both within walking distance of our lodging. With the rainy season upon us, we didn't get to explore aroung the rainforest nearly as much as I would have liked. Here are some of the mossy photos from the adventures.

All available surfaces were covered in mosses including tree trunks, fallen logs and hanging vines.

 

Here we have some mosses in the Calymperaceae. They are a very common family in the Pacific Tropics. Their identifying feature are the clusters of gemmae at the tips of the leaves.

 Some tiny critters like this ant were hiding among the mossy cover.

A few of the species that I saw had some tiny sporophytes rising above the leafy gametophytes.

Some Birds Like the Moss

One of the ornithologists in my department forwarded along this article about Australian woodland bird conservation that mentions mosses.

R.M. Montague-Drake, D.B. Lindenmayer and R.B. Cunningham. 2009. Factors affecting site occupancy by woodland bird species of conservation concern. Biological Conservation Volume 142, Issue 12, Pages 2896-2903.

They focused on  patches of woodland and studied which aspects of the woodland affect the presence of 13 different bird species. One of the factors they measured was the % of the ground or rocks that was covered by mosses and lichens.

They found that 5 of the bird species were more likely to be found in woodlands with high percentages of moss and lichen cover. They lichen-ed them! (Teaching Bryology and Lichenology there were so many bad lichen jokes during the laboratory period, but I still found them totally funny.) 

The authors mention that often in other studies they do not distinguish between 'bare ground' and 'moss and lichen covered'. I would have to agree that there is a big difference between the two. Moss layers hold moisture, prevent soil erosion, and serve as housing for invertebrates and other small critters.

It is great to read that some species of birds thoroughly appreciate their moss and lichen neighbors!

Mossy Frog at the New England Aquarium

I visited Boston a couple of weeks ago and we stopped in for an afternoon at the New England Aquarium. It was my first visit and I enjoyed it immensely. My favorites included the 70 year old green sea turtle who doesn't like to eat broccoli, but she does like lettuce and brussel sprouts. They also have a great exhibit about jellyfish. The jellyfish were very beautifully dangerous floating around in their tanks. The exhibit also included a lot of educational information regarding jellyfish populations and global climate change. With the warming of the oceans we are in for some serious jellyfish overpopulation issues and since these animals are predators they are going to eat quite a lot of the other sea creatures. Good for the jellyfish. Bad for everything else.

In a surprising turn of events I ran into some moss at the aquarium! Mainly it was used in the exhibits of the tropical species to soften the surroundings, keep things moist, and add some greenery. The photo below was the mossiest one of them all!


And what animal just happens to live in the display full of moss? Oh, the mossy frog Theloderma corticale. Many organisms have common names that describe the other plants or animals that they look like. There are the fern mosses (Thuidium sp.) and the feather mosses (Hypnum sp.), just to name a few.

I would have to agree that this frog is well camoflauged to sit on mossy tree trunks and hide from predators. It is an example of an organism evolving to blend in with its surroundings. Those frogs who did not blend in would have been eaten by predators and those that blended in would have been survived to reproduce more mossy looking frogs. This system of natural selection over many years has led to the highly patterned and frilly frog that we see today. (Check out the bottom photo to get a sense of how frilly the arms and legs of the frog were. That was my favorite part about him/her!)


Here is a close up shot of the little guy/gal. I had a hard time shooting through the glass front of the exhibit , so I apologize for the fuziness. You can see some additional photos on the wiki page of this frog species.

Microarthropods Help to Disperse Sperm

Cronberg, N., R. Natcheva, and K. Hedlund. 2006. Microarthropods Mediate Sperm Transfer in Mosses Science 313: 1255.

I was tidying up my computer desktop today and came across a really cool article about moss sperm. Yes, mosses have sperm. They are flagellated and get around by swimming in water. This fact can limit the distance that sperm can travel since they need a film of water to swim through. This is not an issue for plants such as pine trees and dandelions, because their equivalent dispersal units are pollen. Pollen is more easily dispersed since it can be transported long distances via wind or animal pollinators.

There are some interesting ways that bryophytes can disperse their sperm. One of them is a type of liverwort that explosively sends its sperm into the air, thus sending it farther from the parent plant. I discussed this Airborne Sperm Dispersal and the associated video in a previous post. Click here for a link to that blog post.

Getting back to the paper at hand, researchers hypothesized that sperm could be dispersed via small arthropods such as springtails and mites. Animals act as pollinators for many flowering plants, maybe they interact with the sperm of mosses as well?

They tested this hypothesis in an experiment where they placed the male and female mosses at different distances from each other and with or without microarthropods. They found that the mosses that were separated without a film of water connecting them could not reproduce. The sperm could not travel to the eggs without the water and no sporophytes were produced. When the microarthropods were added to containers under these same conditions ... (drumm-roll) ... sporophytes were produced! They are not sure exactly how, but the sperm were able to catch a ride on the arthropods and to be transported from the male to female mosses. It is a pretty amazing feat if you ask me and I think that it would be great to see a SEM photo of the sperm attached to the microarthropods.

In case you have never before seen one, this is a photo of some moss antheridia of Funaria hygrometrica that I took. Sperm are made inside of the brown antheridia. My former officemate always describes them as 'corn dog-shaped' when teaching. The green structures intermingled with them are hairs with swollen apical cells.

Check out the original article too see their data and figures. It is a short, but good, read.

Ant on the Edge

I saw this ant hanging off the end of a liverwort yesterday and just had to take a photo. She seemed pretty confused and was not sure how to get down. I wonder why she climbed up this tree and out onto this liverwort in the first place? Searching for food or seeking on the edge bryophyte thrills?

Questing for Fern Gametophytes (Part 1)

We spent an afternoon digging through moss mats looking for fern gametophytes. The main body that you would typically call a fern (the large, dissected, frond portion) is a sporophyte. Equivalent to this portion of the moss. Ferns also have gametophytes, however they are not nearly as large as the leafy green moss gametophytes. Fern gametophytes are typically less than a centimeter in size and one cell layer thick. We were particularly interested in finding gametophytes of epiphytic ferns. An epiphyte is a plant that lives on another plant. The plant that it lives on is called a phorophyte (phoro- meaning carrying or bearing). The epiphyte may are may not be parasitic on the phorophyte, but usually when people are talking about epiphytes in general they are not. The gametophytes of the epiphytic ferns are typically ribbon shaped and nestled within the fern mats that grow on tropical trees.

We collected moss mats off of trees and then dug through them in the lab in search of fern gametophytes. Here are some photos of the process and what I found with some of the photos below the fold.

Above is a piece of the moss mat that I was digging through. You can see my finger for scale.

This is one of the fern gametophytes that we found in the moss mat. I personally found one, but did not get a picture of it before passing it off to share with others. This is a ribbon-shaped gametophyte that is from a fern in the Hymenophyllaceae (filmy fern family).

While searching through the moss mat I came across this tiny snail shell. It is only a millimeter long, hence the fuzzy photo. It was so tiny and very cute.

The moral of the story is that there are tons of plants and animals besides moss growing in a moss mat. They are their own mini ecosystem. This idea is not limited to moss mats of the tropics. I have explored moss mats in Connecticut and found many interesting creatures.