Nature News September 2016 – The pleasures of crawling around in the damp
Posted on 6 September, 2016 by Connecting Country
On page 12 in this week’s Midland Express (6 September 2016) there is a great Nature News piece by local naturalist and co-author of the soon to be released local Eucalyptus guide, Bernard Slattery, about the wonder of those tiny and important life-forms – the mosses.
Moss on Mount Alexander… a world you can get lost in. Photo by Bernard Slattery
This year we can celebrate a goodish winter: cold, grey, and—most importantly—wet.
And, apart from replenished dams, this wet winter is good because it gives us a reason to go out into the bush, get down on our knees, and become completely absorbed in looking at the micro universe of…MOSS.
Moss isn’t just a green monotonous smudge. It’s beautiful and very variable. To appreciate this fully, you have to get right down close with a hand lens, or a camera with macro lens. You do risk embarrassment by doing this. A few times I’ve been lying flat on my stomach checking out the moss, and concerned passers-by have stopped to ask after my health so it does help if you can wave a camera or a hand lens to reassure people you’re OK.
The wet winter has created great beds of moss in our forests. Moss has repopulated crevices in walls and appeared in patches in lawns and corners of garden beds.
Mosses are tiny and simple. Unlike more familiar plants like grasses, they don’t have roots: they absorb water and nutrients directly into their leaves. They also reproduce via fine, dust-like spores, not seeds.
They’re ancient plants, maybe the first to have colonised the land. There’s a theory that early mosses, over 400 million years ago, played a big part in boosting oxygen in the atmosphere, laying the foundations for all sorts of future evolutions.
Mosses are useful. They’re amazingly hardy and can colonize bare land so they’re good at helping the recovery of eroded landscapes. They can tolerate long dry periods: seemingly dead crusts spring to life at the first shower of rain.
Seen up close, mosses are intricate, colourful and enormously various. Although some are so tiny as to be hard to make out without a microscope, there are plenty of species noticeable to the naked eye. Some leaves are rounded, some are thin as wisps; colours are every shade of green; and spore head stalks can be red, orange, green or yellow.
A great resource for finding out more is Bernard Slattery and Cassia Read’s Mosses of dry forests in south eastern Australia. To purchase a copy visit the Friends of the Box Ironbark Forests webpage www.fobif.org.au.
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