Mosses and the Money

March has been a busy writing month for me. I have written 4 grant proposals to try to get a hold of some money to fund my research. I applied to an internal granting competition through my department and outside grants through the Botanical Society of America, American Microscopical Society, and the International Association of Bryologists. They range in funding amounts from $500-$1500. Think good thoughts for me. I am hoping to be awarded some money to fund my moss research. My backup plan is to start regularly purchasing lottery tickets.

In other money news, the two undergrad students who are working with me, Leah and Melissa, both received awards to fund their research. Melissa was awarded $500 from UConn's Office of Undergraduate Research to fund her calyptra study. (A calyptra is a little cap of gametophytic tissue that covers the top of the moss sporophyte as it develops.) And Leah found out on Friday that she was awarded a Summer Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF) grant through the same office as Melissa's award. The SURF award includes $500 to fund her research and a $3000 stipend to cover living expenses. With the economy being down the competition was even tougher than previous years. I heard that they had over 100 applications and gave out ~30 awards. The competition is open to students from all disciplines across the university, so it is pretty exciting that she got this award! I am looking forward to having more time this summer to help in advising her on her project. She will be using DNA sequence data to examine the relationships between members of the moss genus Micromitrium.

I am hoping that this is a good omen and that I will have just as good of money/funding luck as the undergrad students I am advising! I will keep you all posted on the outcomes.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Shamrocks and leprichauns are green just like mosses. To celebrate the day I dug through my digital photos and came up with some green mossy gems to share. Below is a photo of the moss species that I am working on for my dissertation research, Funaria hygrometrica.

This is another species in the Funariaceae, Physcomitrium pyriforme with sporophytes that have matured and are now brown.

All of these photos were taken a couple of years ago. I initially tried growing my mosses on soil in pots in the greenhouses we have on campus. Unfortunately the mist rooms kept them too moist and the mosses were overrun by cyanobacteria and algae. That is when I switched to growing them in little plastic terrariums on a light cart in my laboratory.

I am not sure which species is below. The leafy gametophytes of members of the Funariaceae all look very similar and I did not mark the photo.

There are a few more photos below the fold. Enjoy!

These are some hornworts that my labmate Juan Carlos had planted up in the greenhouse. From the almost readable label it looks like they might be in the genus Anthoceros.

An additional up close shot of the capsules and calyptra of Funaria hygrometrica.

In this batch of bryophyte images I also took a number of shots of the orchids that grow in our teaching greenhouses. Though they are gaudy angiosperms I thought that I would include a couple of them here.

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.

Personal Webpage Update

I took the time over winter break to update my resume/curriculum vitae. Unfortunately with the business of the semester it has languished in obscurity. Since this week is spring break and campus is quiet as the undergrads and my lab mates are off to sunny locals, I got around to updating my website to match.

The general layout is still the same. I added a bit about the research that I did in high school and updated my research interests.

You can link here to check it out.

Berry Go Round #14

The latest edition of the plant carnival Berry Go Round has been posted at Gravity's Rainbow.

For more about blog carnivals and my posts about the earlier editions of Berry Go Round, click here.

Winter Mosses

A friend of mine recently moved to Virginia and on a hike in the Shenandoah National Park she spotted some mosses growing on boulders in the winter snow. Since I still have not taken any moss photos this winter, I decided to share hers on the blog.

This rock looks to have some type of Orthotrichaceae with brown sporophytes left over from last season. There also appears to be some Dicranum sp. in the lower left of the photo. These are just my best guess given what I can make out from the photo.

For this photo I am not sure what type of moss is in the lower center of the photo. Would anyone like to hazard a guess? As for the large patch of lighter green moss, I would bet money that is a species of Thuidium.

Thanks for sending the photos Em!

Bryophytes and Biodiversity

I was reading Science Daily this morning with my cup of coffee in hand and came across this article. I have heard about this research before since my advisor, Bernard Goffinet, was involved, but had not seen this article or the primary research publications on the project. The project that they describe explores the biodiversity in the forests and tundra areas of Chile. This biodiversity in southern South America is compared to that of the southern tip of Africa. They determined that "5% of the world's bryophytes are found at the southern tip of the Americas, in an area representing less than 0.01% of the Earth's land surface". That is quite a high number of bryophyte species for the area exmined. Thus these regions are considered bryophyte biodiversity hot spots.

Another interesting aspect of this project is that they are encouraging ecotourism and have written a bryophyte field guide for the region. Conservation efforts have also been undertaken to protect the flora and fauna of the region by establishing the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

You can read the article from Science Daily here. Or you can link to the primary research article below.

Rozzi R., J. Armesto, B. Goffinet, W.R. Buck, F. Massardo, J. Silander, Jr., M. Kalin-Arroyo, S. Russell, C. Anderson, L. Cavieres, B. Callicott. 2008. Changing biodiversity conservation lenses: Insights from the Subantarctic non-vascular flora of southern South America. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6: 131-137.

Both southern Chile and South Africa are on my list of places that I would like to visit some day, but for now I will have to settle with readng about them and their fabulous flora from far away. Enjoy!

Moss Slogans

I saw this slogan generator over at Seeds Aside and I thought that I would give it a spin. Some of the slogans that it spits out are pretty clever, but I admit I pressed the sloganize button a number of times before I came up with this one. I thought that it was fun and could stimulate some philosophical ponderings.

Wouldn't You Rather Be Moss?

Enter a word for your own slogan:

Generated by the Advertising Slogan Generator. Get more moss slogans.

What type of plant would you want to be? I like mosses but if I had to choose one type of plant to be I think that I would pick something larger. I like many of the trees that grow on brackish coastline areas that are called mangrove habitat. I think that I would be a Rhizophera mangle. The plants are water dispersed and I think that it would be great to have an oceanic adventure before settling down to live in the constant wash of the tides.

The Moss Room Restaurant

Amy over at Cells in Culture visited the California Academy of Sciences during winter vacation. She came across a restaurant called the Moss Room, pictured here and below. The online photo is a little far away for an ID, but Amy's up close assessment was that the wall is covered by mats of dried Sphagnum (peat moss). The wall also looks to include some ferns, bromeliads (pineapple relatives), and maybe an orchid, just above the E and M in the sign. From the photos the moss looks pretty brown and not very green in spots, leading me to think that some of it may no longer be alive. And that is too bad as keeping moss alive doesn't take much more than a little water and light.

I think that their logo featuring two sporophytes is neat, however it does not appear botanically accurate. Sporophytes consist of a single capsule (sporangium) that contains spores, elevated on an unbranched stalk. Their logo looks as though the two stalks are attached at the base, which is just not so. But it was probably not designed by a botanist, so we will cut them a little slack.

The menu features Grilled Monterey Squid-chickpeas and jalapeno pesto/ Smoked Trout. Needless to say this restaurant's food is a little outside of the price range of a Grad Student, but Amy did get the free photo of the moss wall. Thanks for use of the photo Amy!

List of Botany Blogs

Are you are in search of more blogs to read that are botanically centered? If so I just heard about a list that was compiled of 100 botany blogs. The blogs highlighted range from the general to those written by professionals, with topics spanning climate focused to taxonomy to botanical gardens. I think that it offers a nice selection. I have read quite a few of them (Gravity's Rainbow, Seeds Aside, A Neotropical Savanna,...etc.) through the Berry Go Round community. Or I know the authors personally my pal Emily writes the blog No Seeds about ferns. And if you scroll down to #29, I made the cut! Moss Plants and More was kindly included on the list. Thanks to Christina Laun, the author of the article, for including this blog in the list. There are also a number of blogs that I was not aware of and thus have never read. The world wide web is such a large place and there is a lot of junk out there sorting through to find the good bits can be a challenge. I organize the blogs that I follow using Google Reader. It is super handy for keeping up to date on the latest post from my favorite blogs. However I usually do not read the posts using the reader. Most times I click through to the actual blog where there is more color and a stylish layout that makes the reading all that more enjoyable. Enjoy the selection and I hope that you find a blog that satisfies your botanical hunger.

Berry Go Round #13

The latest edition of the plant carnival Berry Go Round has been posted at Watching the World Wake Up. It is a great gathering of plant related posts to get you through the snowy winter.

Happy Anniversary Berry Go Round!

For more about blog carnivals and my posts about the earlier editions of Berry Go Round, click here.

Winter Wonderland

The cold and blustery winter is upon us. Most of the green plants have dropped their leaves or died back for the winter. The mosses may be the only bit of green that you spot when trudging through the snow on a crisp winter day. Mosses do not die back over winter, instead they hibernate. They go into a state of suspended animation where they can survive freezing temperatures. Exposed to the wind or buried beneath the snow they are quite the winter troopers. Mosses are even able to grow on Antarctica!

How are they able to tolerate freezing temperatures? Well, scientists have been trying to figure this out and they have discovered some of the strategies that the mosses are using.

1) Nagao, M., K. Oku, A. Minami, K. Mizuno, M. Sakurai, K. Arakawa, S. Fujikawa, D. Takezawa. 2006. Accumulation of theanderose in association with development of freezing tolerance in the moss Physcomitrella patens. Phytochemistry 67: 702–709.
In this research article they determined that the mosses load up their cells with a variety of sugars (i.e. sucrose, theanderose) that protect against damage caused by ice crystals. They have to build up these sugars in their cells over time to acquire this freezing tolerance. They can't just jump from the warmth of indoors into the icy cold. If I were to take my mosses from the lab and put them outside they would not survive.

2) Close, T. J. 1996. Dehydrins: Emergence of a biochemical role of a family of plant dehydration proteins. Physiologia Plantarum 97: 795-803.
Dehydrins are a special type of protein that helps the moss cells survive freezing and dehydration, hence the name. These proteins interact with the plasma membrane and other proteins inside the cells. They help to protect them from damage. No matter the amount of protection moss cells do become damaged during freezing, but as long as the damage is not too severe the cells can repair themselves during the spring thaw.

Overall I think that it is a really neat system and I am sure that there is more for the scientists to figure out about freezing tolerance in mosses.

Next time you are out you should shift some snow to check out the mosses beneath, but be sure that you replace the snow that you have moved. The snow can act as insulation keeping the mosses a little warmer and protecting them from the wind. One time when I did dig up a patch and forgot to cover it back up the plants were dead when I returned in the spring. I will not make that mistake again.

The photo to the right is from my annual New Year's Day hike at the James L. Goodwin State Forrest. The only habitat shot that I took was this one of the snowy scenery. We did see a few mosses peaking out of the snow, but it was way too cold for me to take off my gloves to operate my camera more than once. Next time I am out I will definitely take some photos of mosses in the snow. Enjoy the weather!