Berry Go Round #36

The January edition of the plant carnival Berry Go Round has been posted at Seeds Aside.  The selection ranges this month from GMOs and a Fern rap to parasites and taxonomy. Enjoy the selection of posts!

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

A Field Trip to Chile

One of my advisors, Dr. Bernard Goffinet, arrived back in Connecticut from a field trip to southern Chile to study mosses and lichens. Another scientict on the expedition, Dr. Bill Buck, a researcher at the New York Botanical Garden, wrote several blog posts about this trip. They are posted at The New York Botanical Garden's blog Plant Talk.

The posts are a travel log that covers the challenges of field work in the midst of the protests in Punta Arenas, Chile. Fortunately everyone made it back to the states safely.

Thanks Juan Carlos for the link! 


Update 27 Jan 2011: Several of the researchers including Dr. Bill Buck are still in Chile doing fieldwork. He will be sending more blog posts from the field in the upcoming days.  

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!

A Peat Moss Conquering America

Sphagnum peat moss made the news over at BBC Earth News last week. The title of the paper tells it all "One haploid parent contributes 100% of the gene pool for a widespread species in northwest North America". I could go on to try and give my own take on this research, but I think that the BBC article does a good job of hitting the highlights. All the other mentions of this research seem to point back to this BBC article. Way to go BBC mentioning some cutting edge bryo-research!

Here is a link to the abstract for the journal article. To access the full publication you may need to have a subscription through your library. 

Thanks to my pal Kathryn for forwarding me this article!

Moss Witch

My winter break reading included a book of science fiction short stories, entitled "When it Changed: Science into Fiction". I heard about this book through an article in Field Bryology from the British Bryological Society. I can't seem to locate the exact article, but as soon as I find it I will post it up.

This anthology piqued my interest due to the interaction between scientists and story writers. For each of the 16 short stories, a writer was paired with a scientist. Through a series of interviews the research and scientific interests of the scientist were discussed and woven into the science fiction story of the authors. Each short story is followed by an afterword from the scientist commenting on the story.

Of special interest for me was the story by Sara Maitland, "Moss Witch". She collaborated with Dr. Jennifer Rowntree, currently a researcher at the University of Manchester. The story made the 'short list' for the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award. The full story was read on air by Hannah Gordon, but the full audio seems to be no longer accessible on the web.

The story has also been made into a stop action film. It struck me that a lot of the greenery used in the scenes are not actually mosses. They are lichens some of which look to have been painted. I understand that live mosses are typically pretty wet and that might result in a lot of smearing and wetting of the painted background. However the fact that they didn't use mosses seems a little counter to the goal of integrating accurate science into science fiction.  

Overall think that it is a really vivid and interesting story. However being highly steeped in the scientific world of mosses, all of the mossy science details were distracting to my fact checking sensibilities. I was able to fully immerse myself in the adventures of the other stories in the anthology. I think that those of you with a love for but less immersion in mosses will find the story quite enjoyable. If anyone finds a full link to the audio or video for the story it would be great to hear about it in the comments. 

     Happy New Year!

Berry Go Round #35

The December edition of the plant carnival Berry Go Round has been posted at An Accidental Botanist.  Enjoy all the holiday plant posts!

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

Persistent P's Permeating the Polytrichiaceae

In lab group last week we read an article about the moss family Polytrichiaceae. These are the mosses that have fabulous little lamellae on their leaves. Some species are quite common and can be found in open disturbed edge habitat. They can be recognized by their star-shaped form when viewed from above and they are often one of the largest mosses that you will see in the field.


Bell, Neil E. and Jaakko Hyvönen. 2010. Phylogeny of the moss class Polytrichopsida (BRYOPHYTA): Generic-level structure and incongruent gene trees. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 55: 381-398. 

Species are typically grouped into the larger category of genera based on the morphology of the plants, their physical appearance. Thus all the members of the genus Atrichum (the smooth capped mosses) look similar to each other and the same for other genera such as Polytrichum (the hairy capped moss). Sometimes it ends up that these morphological groupings are confirmed by the DNA sequence data and all the members of the genus did descend from a common ancestor. Other times the DNA data shows that the members are not descended from a recent common ancestor and are instead distantly related. The morphology and the DNA evidence tell a different story. In this study both Polytrichastrum and Oligotrichum are composed of members that are distantly related. The later genus has a distinct geographic pattern with all the northern members being related to each other and all the southern members in the other group. Overall I think that it is pretty cool to explore these morphological hypotheses with DNA data. You never know what there is to be found. 

Another paper on this group of mosses by the same authors.
Bell, Neil E. and Jaakko Hyvönen. 2010 A phylogenetic circumscription of Polytrichastrum (Polytrichaceae): Reassessment of sporophyte morphology supports molecular phylogeny. American Journal of Botany 97: 566-578. 

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.