February 2014 Desktop Calendar

No I don't think that you should put me on your desktop for February : )  Continue reading and I will get to the calendar at the end of my tale.

During the sunny mild month of January I went to the California wine country with one of my good pals from my time as an undergraduate botany student at Miami University. We went to a number of lovely wineries that allowed us to walk around the vineyards with our glasses of wine. The vines were bare, both of fruit and leaves, but there were many wonderful shades of brown and the clouds were amazing! Since it was winter we were the only visitors at a number of the wineries in Sonoma and Alexander Valley. My favorite was the sparkling Pine Noir of Mumm Napa.  I would highly recommend checking out the wine country in the off-season.

We also went to see some redwoods at Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve. It was quiet and peaceful with these large giants early in the morning. And as you might have guessed they were covered in mosses. Unfortunately I didn't bring my camera on this trip and instead only had my cell phone, hence the photos don't have quite the resolution. Hopefully the sense of the landscape and the lushness of the mosses comes through in the calendar image for February below.

1 - Single click on the image to open it up in a new window. (If you use the image directly from the blog post you will lose a lot of resolution.)

2 - Right-click (or ctrl-click) on the image, and chose the option that says, "Set as Desktop Background" or "Use as Desktop Picture". The wording may vary.

3 - If the image does not fit your desktop neatly, you may have to adjust the image (Mac: System Preferences - Desktop and Screen Saver - Desktop; Windows: Control Panel - Display - Desktop) and choose "Fill screen" as the display mode of your background image.

Berry Go Round #66

The latest edition of the plant carnival Berry Go Round has been posted at Notes of Nature. 

 Here in California the weather has been unseasonably warm, so I have not been going through much plant withdraw. However, this carnival might be especially good for folks in the eastern half of North America or other locations with winter in full swing. It may be quite a while before you all see any green plants peeking through the white snow. My favorite is Chris Martine's article in the Huffington Post. 3 Awesome Things We Learned About Plants in 2013. Enjoy these blog posts about plants to help you make it through this chilly season!

Thanks to Notes of Nature for including me in the lineup! 
For more about blog carnivals and my posts about the earlier editions of Berry Go Round, click here.

Addressing the Gender Issue

***Spoiler Alert***

This post may contain plot details and quotes from The Signature of All Things. 

It may seem unsurprising that a female bryologist in the early 1800's would disguise her gender on her initial publications. At the time women were not welcomed into scientific circles. Thus Alma's first publications were authored A. Whittaker. Later in the book, with age and time she publishes under her full name, Alma Whittaker. 

"No initials were appended to the name - no evidence of degrees, no membership in distinguished gentlemanly scientific organizations. Nor was she even a "Mrs.," with the dignity that such a title affords a lady. By now, quite obviously, everyone knew she was a woman. It mattered little." 

The reason she says it mattered little is that the world of bryophytes is not a competitive domain and thus she had been allowed to enter with little resistance. This is not just a casual statement. It is supported by the data (Special Report on Women as Academic Authors, 1665-2010 - Chronicle of Higher Education). From 1665-1970 only 8.4% of Ecology and Evolution articles were published by women, whereas in the field of Bryology almost twice as many female authors published (16.3%). Unfortunately disparities in publication rates between the sexes still remain (see the report's data from 1991-2010). 

Why do these disparities still exist? Could it be that our innate biases against women in the sciences negatively impacts women's publication rates? It has been shown that both male and female scientists are significantly biased against female applicants for research positions (Moss-Racusin et al. 2012). This article is behind a paywall. If you do not have access and are interested in reading the full study drop me an email. I could see this spilling over into the realm of scientific publication. It is often easy to tell whether someone is male or female by their first name, opening the door to inherent biases, which could influence both editors and reviewers. 

Inspired by the research of Moss-Racusin and others, professors in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Connecticut are carrying out a gender-blind faculty search. Both applicants and reviewers are requested to use initials or refer to the person applying as 'the candidate'. In an earlier experiment, they attempted to redact all gender-identifying information from applications, but one committee member was able to guess the applicant's gender by the difference in space he vs. she takes up in a sentence (Jones and Urban 2013). They outline and give detailed examples to guide the removal of gender-identifying content. 

Even with these detailed guidelines, there is seemingly no way to address the potential issue that recommendation letter writers typically use different words when describing men vs. women (Madera et al. 2009) [HT to M.T-T. for bringing this point up at lunch]. An example might be using action words such as "independent" and "confident" to describe a man and communal words such as "nurturing" and "helpful" to describe a woman. Hopefully letter writers that are writing for a gender-neutral application will be more aware of gender-biases and thus some of these language differences will disappear. I wonder if they could use this gender-blind search to study that? They could address the question: Do recommendation letter writers use less gender-biased language when they are writing for a gender-neutral job search, compared to a job search where gender-neutrality was not explicitly mentioned in the job advertisement? I would be really interested to know if a gender-neutral job search could also influence recommendation letter language. 

Overall I think that this gender-blind faculty search is a progressive undertaking that will help raise awareness about gender-biases that still exist in the sciences and I am really interested to hear how the process goes. I feel positive that the steps they are taking will decrease bias. What I still wonder is whether this type of job search will result in an increase in the number of female faculty hired? Unfortunately this job search only gives us a sample size of one. Similar efforts are needed nation-wide before we will see if decreasing gender-bias results in more women faculty in the sciences. 

January 2014 Desktop Calendar

We went out on a hike this weekend to Stebbins Cold Canyon Reserve, about an hour outside of Davis into the coastal mountains to the west. Unfortunately the rainy season here in the central valley has been anything but rainy. It is still warm and dusty. A little cooler than the summer, but otherwise not much has change. Thus the mosses that we saw on our hike were quite crispy and dry. Fortunately I found a few that were photogenic no matter their state of hydration. Hopefully January and February will have some rain, but I am not actually very optimistic. This is what the global climate change models predict. Dry places like the central valley will get drier and we are experiencing it first hand.


(IDENTIFICATION UPDATE - 14 April 2014 - This is the moss Dendroalsia abietina. I met this species on the SOBEFREE foray at the end of March.)

1 - Single click on the image to open it up in a new window. (If you use the image directly from the blog post you will lose a lot of resolution.)

2 - Right-click (or ctrl-click) on the image, and chose the option that says, "Set as Desktop Background" or "Use as Desktop Picture". The wording may vary.

3 - If the image does not fit your desktop neatly, you may have to adjust the image (Mac: System Preferences - Desktop and Screen Saver - Desktop; Windows: Control Panel - Display - Desktop) and choose "Fill screen" as the display mode of your background image.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg - Part 3 The Signature of All Things

***Spoiler Alert***

This post may contain plot details and quotes from The Signature of All Things. 

The first five pages of Part 3 focus on mosses with an intensity that covers a wide breadth of topics. 

We are regaled with the fact that mosses are "effortless to transport". They are not only small and light, but easily dried and thus avoid spoilage. Due to these qualities, mosses have been used as packing material for goods and other plants for centuries. The Whittaker botanical company also took advantage of these mossy features, using them to ship plants. Thus Alma not only traded and imported mosses herself, but she was able to mine the crates stored in her family's warehouses, which were filled with dried mosses from around the globe. 

After years of study, Alma accumulated an extensive herbarium. She collected over 8,000 species of mosses, which seems to me a pretty high number considering Alma is written to have worked about 150 years ago. Currently the number of species of mosses is close to 12,500, so that puts Alma at having collected and identified 64% of present day moss species diversity. All without leaving her home in Pennsylvania. I wonder how many species of moss were described by 1848? I am not sure where I would even go to try to locate that fact? A species count from Hedwig would be too early, whereas Brotherus would be too late. Who would have been a contemporary bryologist of Alma Whittaker, living and working during the first half of the 1800's? I will have to do some digging around to see what bryological history I can uncover. 

Alma also writes several books that as a bryologist I would most certainly have on my shelf. By 48 years of age she has written The Complete Mosses of Pennsylvania and The Complete Mosses of the Northeastern United States and has just begun work on The Complete Mosses of North America. The titles of the books could have been a little more creative or perhaps variable, but the sense of her productivity is firmly established. 

In leu of these imaginary books, I would recommend these real identification guides for exploring mosses in Pennsylvania and the Northeast: Outstanding Mosses and Liverworts of Pennsylvania and Nearby States and Common Mosses of the Northeast and Appalachians. As for a good field guide that tackles mosses across all of North America, there are not any that I particularly like. Also a book covering mosses across the entire continent would be a pretty large tome to tote around in the field. My personal preference for identification is a regional guide with a more limited set of species to sift through. If you have a smartphone and internet access, a light field option with wide coverage could be the online Bryophyte Flora of North America. A key to the genera is posted here. Unfortunately all the links are broken and thus it is not connected to the descriptions. The full descriptions are arranged by family here, but you need to know the connections between the two to make them work together. The key is preliminary, so hopefully they will be linked in the final version.

Mosses back from the holidays

I am back from the holidays and some moss photography and blogging is on the menu for my upcoming weekend. 

In the meantime, check out this great post by Juan Carlos Villarreal on Peat, Whiskey, and Genomes. It is jam packed with fun moss facts, references, and lovely photos.

The Mosses of her Passion - The Signature of All Things

From the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of
The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY

***Spoiler Alert***

This post may contain plot details and quotes from The Signature of All Things. 
Proceed with caution!

The mosses have finally arrived as significant characters in Part 3! We discover that Alma has decided to devote her time and energies to studying mosses in the genus Dicranum and she becomes the world expert on this group.  I am most familiar with Dicranum scoparium, the broom moss, which is common in eastern deciduous forests. It's common name comes from the leaves that are all curving in the same direction, as though the moss had been used to sweep the floor. It is one of the first species I like to teach people when walking in the woods. It is charismatic and easy to recognize. 

The moss pictured in this plate is Dicranum squarrosum. The specific epithet of the scientific name describes the leaves of this species, which stick out at right angles to the stem. This arrangement is due to the leaves having a bend in them, which can be seen at the bottom center of the plate. 

It was a bit of a tease, or foreshadowing, that these images of Dicranum were placed at the end of Part I, long before Alma discovered her passion for mosses. Mostly it had me wondering when we would start to hear more about the mosses.  Stay tuned for more to come on the mosses of Part 3!

The Signature of All Things: Part 2 - Catching bryophyte fever

***Spoiler Alert***

This post may contain plot details and quotes from Parts 1 & 2 of The Signature of All Things. Proceed with caution!

The second part of The Signature of All Things focuses on the childhood of the main character Alma Whittaker. In my mind the true main characters, the bryophytes, have yet to truly arrive on the scene. There is a brief mention of mosses being used by birds as material for nest building. Alma also uses mosses to fill the chinks in the walls of her study to cut down on winter drafts. Hornworts come up during a scientific discussion between Alma and her colleague George Hawkes. He describes them to another friend as "...among our least sophisticated plants-". I take mild offense to that statement. I think hornworts are super interesting and highly sophisticated in their ability to establish a mutualistic interaction with cyanobacteria (blue-green algae). They have pores on the underside of the plant that open to allow the algae to enter. The algae then live and grow inside of the hornwort helping to fix nitrogen, making it available for the hornwort to use. I think that establishing a relationship like that is pretty sophisticated. Don't you?

At the tail end of Part 2 bryophytes take their rightful place at center stage. Alma has a revelation that right beneath her nose, on the land she has known her entire life, is a world unexplored. The miniature world of mosses. An entire rock may be covered by dozens of species that occupy distinct niches. A little sunnier over here, a little wetter over there, makes for diverse habitats even within a few feet. It is amazing how small changes in the microclimate can make such a big difference to the bryophytes. The description of Alma's epiphany to focus her botanical energies on mosses is full of lovely imagery, such as the passage below. 

"Now the miniature forest below her gaze sprang into majestic detail. She felt her breath catch. This was a stupefying kingdom. This was the Amazon jungle as seen from the back of a harpy eagle. She rode her eye above the surprising landscape, following its paths in every direction. Here were rich, abundant valleys filled with tiny trees of braided mermaid hair and minuscule, tangled vines. Here were barely visible tributaries running through that jungle..."

Having done so myself, falling in love with bryophytes is an amazing experience. Upon closer inspection, you realize that there is a world of wonder to explore in miniature. The closer you look the more there is to discover. An adventure that can last a lifetime. 

December 2013 Desktop Calendar

The fact that I have exhausted my moss photos from summer hiking definitely means that I am in need of some outdoor time with plants. Fortunately winter in California means it is possible to see mosses without having to dig them out of the snow. I just wish we had a little more rain to help make them more photogenic. My goal before the holiday break. Find some mosses. Take some photos. 

In the meantime this is another view from our summer hiking in New Hampshire to the top of Mt. Monadnock. From this vantage the trees could be a mossy carpet trailing off into the distance...

1 - Single click on the image to open it up in a new window. (If you use the image directly from the blog post you will lose a lot of resolution.)

2 - Right-click (or ctrl-click) on the image, and chose the option that says, "Set as Desktop Background" or "Use as Desktop Picture". The wording may vary.

3 - If the image does not fit your desktop neatly, you may have to adjust the image (Mac: System Preferences - Desktop and Screen Saver - Desktop; Windows: Control Panel - Display - Desktop) and choose "Fill screen" as the display mode of your background image.

The Signature of All Things: Part 1

I read through the first part of The Signature of All Things this past weekend. There is not much to report on the bryological front. Mosses only popped in once or twice. They were used to pack seeds and other plants for transport during long ocean voyages of the 18th and 19th centuries. In this part of the book we are briefly introduced to the main character, Alma, at her birth. Mainly this section focuses on Alma's grandfather, father, and thus her botanical roots.

This book is at the top of my pleasure reading pile. More updates to come after I read through Part 2. 

The Mystery of the Missing Moss

This is a tale of a small group of mosses in the genus Sorapilla. Over the past 150 years they were located by scientists only a handful of times in the wild. That is until recently. A undergraduate student found a population of Sorapilla papuana in Queensland, Australia. 

The real mystery about these mosses is determining its closest relatives. It has a very unique morphology = (exterior size and shape), which has helped researchers come up with hypotheses about its relatives. This new discovery of live mosses means that DNA can be extracted from the plants and used to test these ideas, potentially resolving the conundrum of Sorapilla's relatives.

Honestly I had never known about this genus before hearing about it's recent re-discovery. The article (linked to above) alludes to its unique morphology and I was interested to learn more about it. These mosses grow in tropical regions, so off I went to my Guide to the Bryophytes of Tropical America. To my surprise and delight I discovered that Sorapilla mimics some of my favorite mosses, the Fissidentaceae. 

Both Sorapilla and the Fissidentaceae have leaves in two-ranks, meaning they have a row that runs along the right side of the stem opposite a row that runs down the left side. Most mosses have leaves that spiral around the stem, sticking off in all possible directions. The other cool feature about the leaves is that they are divided into two regions a single layered lamina at the top and a region below where the leaf forks, creating a pocket that clasps the leaf above it. Based on my reading, these are the only two groups of mosses with this type of leaf. Despite these similarities, other features of the sporophyte indicate that Sorapilla and the Fissidentaceae are not closely related. I am really excited to hear what the findings are from the DNA data and which mosses are the closest relatives of Sorapilla. If in the end it is not a close relative of the Fissidentaceae, then it will be another cool example of convergent evolution. Two distantly related species evolving similar morphologies.  

Click here for a link to an image of Sorapilla papuana. 
Not to be confused with sopapillas, the tasty fried pastry.

For comparison, this is a photo of Fissidens that
I took while hiking in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. 

I find it a funny irony that the closest town to the population of the rediscovered moss is called Mossman. It sounds like a town full or moss super heros. MossMan! However, the town name was originally Mosman, so it probably wasn't named for moss plants.  

Hat tip to Dr. Tobias Landberg for sending me the article about this discovery. 

November 2013 Desktop Calendar

Another lovely moss from our summer hike up Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire. This is the moss Polytrichum commune. Its common name is the hairy-capped moss, named so for its hairy calyptra. Calyptra are the little caps of maternal gametophyte tissue that cover the top of the young offspring sporophytes. These caps prevent water loss from the apex of the developing plant. Think of it as your mother sending you out the door to play with a fuzzy little cap atop your head. However, this cap is meant to keep your wet hair from drying out rather than to keep out the cold. I like to think of it as a reverse shower cap. A little odd to imagine the human equivalent, but it works well by keeping the top of the mosses moist in the dry air. For more on calyptra, check out this summary about my PhD research studying calyptrae. Happy November!

1 - Single click on the image to open it up in a new window. (If you use the image directly from the blog post you will lose a lot of resolution.)

2 - Right-click (or ctrl-click) on the image, and chose the option that says, "Set as Desktop Background" or "Use as Desktop Picture". The wording may vary.

3 - If the image does not fit your desktop neatly, you may have to adjust the image (Mac: System Preferences - Desktop and Screen Saver - Desktop; Windows: Control Panel - Display - Desktop) and choose "Fill screen" as the display mode of your background image.