A fellow graduate student forwarded along this link to a BBC news page reporting on the results of a photo competition. The photo that won the student category is a pair of moss sporophytes sticking out of the snow. (#13 in the series.) The photo is entitled Embrace. It is a great picture with nice imaginative imagery in the quote from the photographer. Some of the terms that she uses in the caption are not entirely bryologically accurate or maybe they are just not the terms that I would use. However I am trying to not be such a scientist, so I am not going to critique them here. I encourage you to suspend reality and any terminology hangups that you might have and to enjoy the beauty of these snowy sporophytes.
An additional news source that reported on the competition is the Guardian News. Click here for the link to another version of the moss image and its associated caption. (Photo #7)
(We are reading the book Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style in the Science Communication seminar I am taking. Thus I am trying to relax into my science communication and not be so picky about terms especially when the above photo is art. We shall see how it works.)
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A couple of weekends ago I helped one of my grad student pals move into his new house. I arrived a little early and explored the moss diversity on the property. There was an old well behind the house that was covered by mosses. It has a nice bit of species diversity. I have included some of the photos below.
I was on a photo spree and did not do any collecting to identify the specific species. I think that I will have to visit again to do a more through survey.
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October has been a busy month for me with a trip to Virginia and juggling a number of projects here in the lab. All the balls are still in the air and I am feeling pretty good about that. However as you can see the blogging has suffered, with my last post being over a month ago. I have been amassing ideas for new posts over the month and am planning to write some of those during the upcoming weekend.
For now...
- The latest edition of the plant blog carnival Berry Go Round is up at Beetles In The Bush (#21) for your perusal. My favorite article of the bunch was the post at The Natural Capital about wild grapes. It is a well written post with a good hook at the beginning. Then great facts on identifying wild grapes and tips on avoiding other fruiting plants that you might mistake for grapes.
- The trip to Virginia was to see a friend and former Grad Student from my department who now lives in Virginia. I left the shutter-bugging to the other gals so I don't have any pictures of our outing to the Shenandoah National Park. It was a great autumn day and there were tons of mosses to be seen! If you would like to see some photos and the tale of hiking adventures with four botanists you can check out Em's blog post here.
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One of the sites we visited on the foray was a Cat Den Swamp. There really weren't any areas of open water and the area was dominated by Sphagnum (peat moss). Thus I would have characterized it as a bog rather than a swamp. Bogs are really great habitats to visit. Boots are definitely a necessity or you could go for a pair of bare feet during the summer. I have been to some bogs that are like walking on a water-bed. This one was not that type. It was on full of slurpy sounds that almost pulled my boots off at times.
Above it can be seen that there are many shrubs in this area.
In addition to a lot of peat moss. They ranged in color from light green (above) to a burnt red (below). I didn't collect any Sphagnum mosses, nor did I try to identify them to species. I appreciate and enjoy peat moss much more on an larger ecological scale. They are cool to walk among but I'd rather not key them out to species under the microscope.
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I saw an episode of the Colbert Report last night and moss landscaping/gardening was featured in one of the jokes. You know that things are becoming more popular when they reach the late night comedy shows.
In part of the sketch he mentions turning a backyard koi pond into a peat bog. This statement is actually not impossible. Sphagnum sp. (peat moss) has the ability to change the acidity (pH) of the water in which it lives. It makes the water more acidic, which is better for the moss and usually worse for many of the other plants. Colbert did forget to mention that turning a koi pond into a bog will probably also kill all the koi.
If you are interested in cutting directly to the mossy reference it starts around 3:50min.
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