Berry Go Round #33

The October edition of the plant carnival Berry Go Round has been posted at 10,000 Birds.  Enjoy!

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

Lack of October Posts

Ack! October has come to a close and I have not posted anything up on the blog. Here is the breakdown of what has been up in my mossy world over the past month.

- I have been thinking a lot about explaining my research to the general public in understandable terms.

What I do - I study mosses, small green plants. (visual here - I have my fingers less than an inch apart) All plants are covered by a waxy coating that keeps them moist inside, called a cuticle. (I make a motion of an invisible coating covering the surface of my arm.) My research focuses on how the waxy cuticle develops or forms on the mosses throughout their life. (Moving my hands as though something is growing or time is passing.) I use really powerful microscopes to zoom in to see how this thin, waxy cuticle layer changes over time on the mosses. (Make like I am looking at something tiny.)

     That is where I usually start and depending on the person's level of interest or next question, I continue from there.

- I submitted my first manuscript from my dissertation research to a scientific journal. The paper was turned down by the first journal that I sent it to. I might have been shooting a little high by sending it to a flashy journal with a higher impact factor. Then I reformatted and sent it to a different journal and am waiting to hear if they will send it out for review. Fingers crossed.

- I have been working with a undergraduate student squashing moss tissues to try and count chromosomes. The squashing and staining parts are working well. Now we just need to catch them at just the right developmental stage.

- We (a group project for the Funariaceae grant) have the first color proof of our Brochure focusing on mosses in Connecticut and using them to teach biological concepts to high school students. Stay tuned for a link to the brochure online or where to order. It is almost ready!

- I reviewed a manuscript focusing on bryophytes for a peer-reviewed (me being the peer) science research journal.

And a mossy photo from Malaysia to end the post.

Berry Go Round #32

The September edition of the plant carnival Berry Go Round has been posted at A Blog Around the Clock.  Enjoy the fabulous flora!

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

A Tale of the Sphagnums that Weren't

There are over 350 different species of peat moss in the genus Sphagnum. All of them have a similar morphology with two different types of cells that make up their leaves. Large cells that are dead at maturity and small cells that are alive and contain green chloroplasts. The large hyaline cells have pores that open to the outside of the plant. When they fill with water they enable the plant to function as a sponge and hold up to 20X its dry weight in water. This is the feature that makes Sphagnum peat mosses the most economically important mosses in the world.

Below you can see both the large dead cells and small, green, live cells in a transverse section of a Sphagnum peat moss leaf.
  

I just finished reading a recent scientific article on peat mosses.

A. Jonathan Shaw, Cymon J. Cox, William R. Buck, Nicolas Devos, Alex M. Buchanan, Lynette Cave, Rodney Seppelt, Blanka Shaw, Juan Larraín, Richard Andrus, Johann Greilhuber and Eva M. Temsch. 2010. Newly resolved relationships in an early land plant lineage: Bryophyta class Sphagnopsida (peat mosses). American Journal of Botany 97:1511-1531.


These researchers set out to look at the relationships among the many species of Sphagnum peat mosses. Often plants or animals are initially grouped together based on their morphology (how they look on the outside). This has been the case with peat mosses too.  Using DNA sequence data, these scientists determined that some species traditionally placed in the genus Sphagnum really fall outside of this group. Since they no longer lie within Sphagnum they needed some new names.

One was given a new genus name (from Sphagnum inretortum to Eosphagnum inretortum) and placed into an already established family (Ambuchananiaceae). The prefix eo- means early or primitive, thus this would be the 'early peat moss'. For the other, both a new genus and family was created for the species (from Sphagnum sericeumm to Flatbergium sericeum in the Flatbergiaceae). I looked through the paper for some insight into the etymology of this name, but I did not think they mentioned anything specific about the naming.

Both still close relatives to their abandoned Sphagnum buddies. I know that the changing of plant and animal names may seem like a pain or trivial, but understanding which species are each others closest relatives is important. For example if you have a food allergy to a particular type of plant it is important to know who its close relatives are, because you might be allergic to them too. Or we might stumble across a new chemical in a plant that could be used in a medicine. Knowing that plant's relatives may help us to find similar kinds of helpful chemicals in other plants. Just something to think about when you hear about scientists changing the names of your favorite plant or animal.

Above is a surface view of the two different types of cells in a Sphagnum leaf.

Berry Go Round #31

The latest edition of the plant carnival Berry Go Round has been posted at Seeds Aside. It is quite an in depth line up and a large number of the posts I had not seen over the past month. Moss Plants made the list near the bottom. August was a little sparse on science posts for me here. Guess I will need to move the blog a little higher on my priority list to get around to some more detailed posts. In the meantime enjoy the carnival!

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

A Mossy Bath Rug

A friend sent me this link to a bath mat made of moss. They don't specify what types of mosses they are using, but it looks to be Hypnum or maybe Thuidium. It would make for a pretty interesting bathroom experiment. Mosses do not require too much light and they love high humidity levels, thus the bathroom sounds like the perfect place.

I do wonder where they are getting the mosses. Wild collected, from a local landscaper, or are they growing them for this particular project?  

My Bryology Bookshelf - VI

Field guides to mosses are not super common. If you are a longtime reader of this blog you are probably familiar with my frustrations that there is not a good field guide to the mosses and other bryophytes of eastern North America. There are highly technical books that require the use of a microscope (Crum and Anderson's Mosses of Eastern North America). One of the non-technical books that I have is Walk Softly Upon the Earth: A Pictorial Field Guide to Missouri Mosses, Liverworts and Lichens, by Lisa Potter Thomas and James R. Jackson. This book includes photographs of each species with a scale bar to help with the sizes of the plants and color illustrations for many. The descriptions have a wealth of information covering the habit, species they might be mistaken for and information on the etymology of the names. 

I found it especially interesting and fun that they start the book in just the same way that I start my presentations about mosses. We both start by going through all the plants that are sometimes called moss or are mistaken for mosses but really are not. There is also a section where they discuss the mythology and lore associated with mosses. Scattered throughout the book are whimsical line drawings of the good fairies from German folklore called Moosweibchen. 

I think that the title of the book is a perspective that all of us can strive to implement in our lives. I thoroughly appreciate the authors cautions about over-collecting plants from the wild. I think that is a point that some books on bryophytes miss.

My Bryology Bookshelf - V

Another book that I picked up recently was a great book of fabulous images from Bill and Nancy Malcolm, entitled The Forest Carpet. This book is from the authors of the spectacular bryophyte glossary. They cover all three lineages of bryophytes (liverworts, mosses and hornworts), one lineage of ferns, a couple of fern allies (aka. fern friends), and lichens. The images are large, filling the pages of this coffee-table sized book. Each image comes with an informative caption, identifying the specific species pictured and notes the magnification. There are photos of the plants growing in their particular habitat, closeups of the exterior of the plants, and some sections showing the interior arrangements of the cells.

The goal of this book is to make people aware of the smaller organisms that make up the green background that covers the forest floor like a carpet in New Zealand, hence the title. I think that this book does a great job of immersing you into this miniature world!

Botanical Images

For the past five years, the Botanical Society of America has sponsored a image competition to fund student travel to the annual conference. It is called the TRIARCH "Botanical Images" Student Travel Award. Out of the 83 images submitted this year, three of the images featured mosses. They are the following images:

#19 showing a mixture of small organisms including mosses, lichens and green algae.

#25 showing a bright yellow slime mold climbing the sporophytes of Dicranum flagellare.

#26 showing a cluster of antheridia in Rhizomnium punctatum.

I really love #25! The title of the image is "Ever Higher" and it is just a great description for thinking of the slime mold climbing the saprophyte stalk. I also think that the color contrast is great between the green sporophyte and the yellow slime mold. 

Botanical Society of America Awards

I am happy to report that the bryology research from the Goffinet Laboratory was well received at the Botanical Society of America annual meeting this week!  My labmate Juan Carlos Villarreal recieved the A. J. Sharp Award for the best student paper presented in the Bryology and Lichenology Section. Also I was honored with the Katherine Esau Award for the best student paper in the Developmental and Structural Botany Section.

Thanks to all my great colleagues (EEB Grads, Jones Labmates & Goffinet Labmates) who helped me get my talk ready for the national meeting. I totally appreciate all the help and support!

Berry Go Round #30

The latest edition of the plant carnival Berry Go Round has been posted at Brainripples. I was off in Providence, Rhode Island this week attending the Botanical Society of America annual conference. Today I am back in the office but I am in need of some decompression before diving back into my research, so I think that I will spend the day enjoying the Berry Go Round carnival and will get back to work full-tilt tomorrow. I listened to some great presentations and heard about a lot of cool research. A good portion of it was bryology related and I will look through my notes over the next couple of days to find some fun stories to share here on the blog. 

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

The Moss Videos of the Moment

Apologies, the blog took a bit of a summer vacation while I focused on writing up the first chapter of my PhD dissertation. It reminded me of the hiatus the Puzzler takes on the NPR program Car Talk. It may be a slow transition back to posting often, but I am going to start by shooting for once a week.

The latest news in the moss world has been the publication of an article in Science magazine on the explosive vortex caused by Sphagnum capsules opening. It is the same opening mechanism that I discussed in a post back in April. 

You can link here to the full article Whitaker DL & J Edwards. 2010. Sphagnum Moss Disperses Spores with Vortex Rings. Science 329:406. And here for the four amazing high speed videos that are posted online. 

If you prefer to listen to the news, you can hear more about this study on the Science Magazine Podcast for 23 July 2010. The piece on Sphagnum runs from 12:52 to 20:50 in this episode.

You can tell it is the talk of the town, because all sorts of outlets have been posting about it. They feature it over here at the International Association of Bryologists blog and at Wired Science and on Discover Magazine and the New York Times and at ScienceNews, so you get the idea. This is the hot moss story of the moment. So if you have yet to hear the full story and see the great videos check out some of the links above.