Owaf038. FB122 William Mitten Hurstpierpoint and the bryophytes of the world. Becoming mossy □ – Dark Properties. Dark Properties is a future-focused newsletter connecting personal and planetary ecologies, by Willa Köerner. Subscribe to receive new dispatches in your inbox: This interview is part of Ecologies of Entanglement, a collaborative series with Are.na Editorial. If our world was organized by the principles that characterize moss, how might it feel?
How might we feel? Collectively, I think we’d feel a whole lot better. Here’s why: As a species, moss is inspirationally non-hierarchical. It is unhurried; it lives communally; it seems to universally thrive across topographies, climates, and timescales. In the new web-based project Thinking With Moss, bryophytes (aka moss) serve as both subject and inspiration. As Thinking With Moss explains, the site invites visitors to “explore new models for how we think, design and develop digital collections and archives that speak to the invisible or under-attended histories of the natural sciences.” <3 Willa I just had this conversation with my students. Moss Summer Camp | Multispecies Care Survey. Moss Summer Camp for Social and Environmental Justice is an invitation to reimagine the role of multispecies care across urban and rural settings, following the guidance of moss (Bryophyta sp.). Participants are invited into an embodied experiential approach to knowing and learning from moss, one of the first plants to arrive on land approximately 4.7 million years ago.
Our current moment—a global pandemic, widespread uprisings for racial justice, and increasing climate chaos—asks for fresh ways of being with and relating to our surroundings. moss Summer Camp offers a path to immersion with neighborhood mosses, asking: What if we make the “language of moss” part of the decision-making process as we work to build diverse and equitable multispecies communities where all living beings can thrive? Why moss? When the EPA went to the Climate March last September, moss marched with us. They are still with us in this time of transformation. Creating the Climate for moss Summer Camp. Among the Moss Piglets: The First Image of a Tardigrade (1773) — The Public Domain Review. The possibility of peering into a world invisible to the naked eye was a relatively recent phenomenon at the time. Microscopes had been used from the sixteenth century, but it was not until the 1660s that microscopy became a somewhat common scientific method.
This was the decade when Dutch natural philosopher Antonie van Leeuwenhoek created a microscope that magnified objects up to two hundred times — visualising sperm cells, plant cells, and the structure of minerals — and Robert Hooke of the Royal Society published Micrographia, illustrating his observations of fleas, cork, and other microscopic structures in exquisite detail. Early microscopes were plagued by technical issues, including impurities in the glass, spherical aberration (image blurring), and chromatic aberration (colour separation) — only solved two centuries later. Nevertheless, for the tiny water creatures that Goeze was observing, they were quite sufficient to make startling new discoveries.
The secret world of moss, ancient ancestor of all plants and vital for the health of the planet. When people consider extraordinary plants, most probably don’t spare a thought for moss. It blends in against the green background of plant life, and seems to grow everywhere – whether you want it to or not. You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, here. But this group of plants, which actually comprises between 12,000 and 15,000 species, is astonishing. Their almost unique resilience allows them to grow practically everywhere on Earth. They are helping scientists understand the evolution of life, and are one of the most ancient plant groups alive today. A recent study by an Australian research team found that mosses are the lifeblood of habitats around the world, with plants and soil in better shape almost everywhere they grow.
Despite their importance, mosses are often overlooked due to their diminutive size. But in fact, mosses help hold up entire ecosystems. Many people think of plants as nice-looking greens. Drivers of critical ecosystem services. Plant of the Week – 18 to 25th January 2021 – The Common Liverwort, Marchantia polymorpha L. – Botany in Scotland. A quick trip to our local shopping centre, necessitated by a looming draconian COVID lockdown, took me (DC) to one of those characterless carparks. Being a committed bryologist, my eyes averted to the pavement where I spotted the green thalli of Marchantia polymorpha, with its typical splash cups.
We knew the species offers insights into early land plant evolution, that it serves as a ‘lab rat’ of systems biology and we had heard of its pharmacological and therapeutic potential. History and nomenclature The first indisputable illustrations of M. polymorpha date back to the middle of 15th Century (Bowman, 2016). Figure 1 (a) and (b). So, what does this Latin name tell us about M. polymorpha? Linnaeus (1753) codified the species name M. polymorpha, implying that it is polymorphic. Table 1. M. polymorpha is the type or ‘signature’ species for the plant Phylum Marchantiophyta, in common parlance ‘the liverworts’. Life Cycle Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5. Figure 6. Figure 7. Ecology. This Moss Uses Quartz as a Parasol. S. caninervis, a common moss in the Mojave Desert, spends most of the year parched and brown — in a state of suspended animation awaiting the next rain.
“It is something only a mother can love,” Dr. Mishler said. But the mosses are long-lived; a single clump could easily be a centenarian. Although S. caninervis made up more than two-thirds of the hypolithic moss at Wrightwood, the researchers identified another species, Tortula inermis. That moss typically grows at lower, hotter elevations, but was able to thrive at the Wrightwood site, seeming to rely on the quartz for protection from the cold. These quartzite oases, while common at Wrightwood, only emerge in what Ms. But the vastness of the desert and the abundance of pebbles means that serendipity can become commonplace, Ms. The study highlighted the importance of microenvironments that may be invisible to the human eye, Ms. After presenting this research at several conferences, Ms.