Moss Poem

I came across this poem in the field journal of the British Bryology Society. I thought that it was appropriate timing to post as May Day is tomorrow. I think that it is a great poem of spring celebration! The warm weather is definitely upon us here in Connecticut. The layout in the original has several words spaced out and hanging out in space. I tried to have blogger space them out. However it kept sliding them back to the right no matter what I tried. Thus the dots (...) that I have added as place holders were not in the original version. I have added them to try to approximate the author's formatting as close as possible.

One more week of classes and then a week of final exams. Once the semester is over I am looking forward to getting outside to take some moss photos to post up and comment about on the blog. Until then enjoy the poetry of spring!


The Tundra Terrarium
(May Day, May Day)

My ............. sings! .................................... heart
These new things:
Pollen flings .............................................. first
Microscopic moss
Telescoping stems
Voluptuous, starburst moss
Little tinker-bell lilies
Spotted fawns
Spotted fawn lilies
Caribou antlers on caribou ferns,
Shed for the gentler season
Innocent inocybe
Cleopatra's Calyptrae
Sophocles' Sporophytes
My seen mycena tips its cap
Mushroom mycelium,
My ceiling
The forest is my floor
Earth Bursts

You! - concrete people!
You who live in the city
Have you no thirst?
This little bug
This pollywog .......................................... hand
This quenching,
Quenched land
Plant a plant that stretches
Up and up for the sun
Plant a plant that turns
Its back to darkness
Yearning for the light:
Spindly-dwindly

Your soul is suffering for lack of light
Come out, where souls take flight!

Hill, Ruth. Feb 2009. Field Bryology. Bulletin of the British Bryological Society. No. 97, P.23.
ruthhill@joiedevivregardens.ca

Website All About Liverworts

I just heard about this new website entitled, "ELPT: Early Land Plants Today - Uniting Taxonomy, Nomenclature, & Geography". It is a web resource devoted to information on liverworts (Marchantiophyta), one of the three groups of bryophytes.

This webite has a really extensive literature list that includes 12,000 references about liverworts. There are also links to a few taxon pages with sketches of the species. Additionally there is an extensive list of liverwort checklists. A checklist has all the species in a particular group of interest, plant or animal, that occur in a specific region or area of the world. The area a particular checklist covers can be as small as a local park or as extensive as an entire country. They are a good resource for discovering what species occur in your neck of the woods.

Mosses Outside My Apartment

I was sitting in the park next to my apartment building a few days ago and took these photos.

What do you think?

1) The mosses grew like this on the fence bar.
2) They jumped up there to get a better look at the river.
3) People have fun arranging mosses in the park.

I vote for #3. I thought that it was pretty fun to think that someone arranged the mosses in a very decorative manner. But I wonder how many people have seen them and thought that they just grow on the fence like that naturally. I have seen mosses growing on a number of man-made items. However these ones have huge chunks of sand sticking to the bottom of each clump, which makes me think that they were relocated.

I will definitely be on the lookout for more moss relocation "art" in town.

Berry Go Round #15

The latest edition of the plant carnival Berry Go Round has been posted at A Neotropical Savanna. Stop by to check out all of the fabulous plant related posts!

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

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.