Ep. 566 - The Wonderful World of Bryophytes

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Indefensive Plants podcast, the official podcast of indefensiveplants.com. What's up? This is your host, Matt. Welcome to the show. How is everyone doing this week? I hope you brought your hand lens because we are going to appreciate the world of tiny botany, specifically the bryophytes, the mosses, the hornwortes, and the liverworts. These are absolutely remarkable plants that deserve far more attention than they get. And as you're going to hear, they can tell us a lot about what the environment is doing. Joining us to talk about this is Brittany Miller, aka Brittany the Botanist, who is so dedicated to the world of bryophytes and wants to share that love with you. It's a lot of fun talking with her, so I don't want to keep you from it any longer. let's just jump right into it. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Brittany Miller. I hope you enjoy. All right, Brittany Miller, welcome to the podcast. It is so great to have you here. Let's start off with an introduction. Tell everyone a little bit about who you are and what it is you do. Oh my goodness. Yes. Hi, I'm Brittany Miller or Brittany the botanist. What I do is study moss. I am a moss lover, passionate about moss. And more specifically, currently, I work with a consulting company studying wetlands and long term. We do long-term monitoring of wetlands and impacts to the wetlands, particularly the mosses and the vegetation that comprise those wetlands in northern Alberta, where there's a lot of oil and gas exploration. Oh, wow. So very important time to be looking at these sorts of things. And it's really charming to know that someone is in your role, but also someone like you also cares about the moss. Because if you think like sedges and grasses often get kind of breezed over and sort of species surveys and stuff, you start talking about mosses and liverworts. And yeah, definitely. That's one of the big hurdles of my industry is not many people know the mosses because they are so taxonomically difficult. They're tiny, hard to get into. There's not a lot of literature that helps people learn them. So they often get overlooked or grouped together, even though like in analyses or in vegetation surveys, even though they all have specific niches or specific roles in the ecosystem or indicate specific things. definitely what I get to do yeah yeah and they're lucky to have you doing what you do but where did this journey begin was it always about moss I mean how did you kind of fall into this world of of brow fights I love sharing the story because it's it's kind of ridiculous so I went to the University of Alberta and I wanted to be a botanist more specifically an ethnobotanist I was really interested in the interplay between people and plants how we like came to like appreciate them in our and utilize them in our everyday world but um i took a um briophyte course as an electives part of my program and i found them so difficult i hated them oh no i hated them and uh i did really poorly and um as i kind of just phoned it in and so i you know a little bit through the course i decided this is a terrible attitude to have that if i was going to be a well-rounded botanist i needed to really appreciate the mosses so it kind of shifted gears and put everything I had into this course. And I had a really great mentor, Catherine Lafarge at the U of A who was running this course and ended up excelling and just really finding my passion for it. And she saw this and was really inspired by some of the undergrad research I embarked on and then wanted to take me in as a master's student. And it all just kind of went from there. Wow. Just became my total world. That is such a great journey into this world. and it's oftentimes the challenges that bring us the most joy when we finally get over that initial hurdle and it's so neat to know that you struggled because yeah it could so easily have gone the other way but it's I think all the stronger when you can come around and say no I worked for this I earned this and now I have a new appreciation for an entire branch of the tree of life that like we've been talking about this whole time kind of gets overlooked most of the time. exactly yeah no I feel um very lucky that um that there was first of all a program like that at the U of A because not every um institution has people who study bryophytes it's it's not commonly considered again um just even in academia um so yeah like I'm very proud of where I've come with my journey with bryophytes nice yeah that's another good point to make too is is often universities are limited in what the they can kind of teach by the scope of what people they have there. And so to actually come across a program on bryophytes is spectacular because I don't know a lot of well-trained botanists that do these kinds of things day in and day out that have those skill sets, because like you said, they can be kind of difficult to get your head wrapped around. And so when you were kind of diving in, was it one of those things that like, okay, now I need the equipment. A lot of it's hand lenses. A lot of it's like pretty intense magnification, right? Yeah. Yeah. I was fortunate enough to get my hands on some microscopes that allowed me to like in my places of employment but then also my own personal scopes um which i don't know if i can do a little plug for a budding biologist yes so this half the battle is it's it's fun to field id um with your hand lens but that only gets you so far and it often leads to a lot of incorrect um determinations or identifications because they're tiny and they look very very similar and if you haven't trained your eye to them like it's very easy to confuse them. That's common practice. So what helps is to get them underneath the microscope, dissect these tiny little things, these millimeter in length leaves, cutting them up and actually looking at them at high power magnification. And so in order to get the tools to do that, you need these microscopes and they're very hard to get because they're pretty expensive. So the Omax brand, I recommend to people who are trying to get into biology or even just, you know, any kind of microscopy because they're decent and they're pretty affordable. So that's what I use. And I like them. So yeah, those initial sort of hurdles to getting even into something can be really tough, especially for many of us that are struggling for financial support in a lot of these endeavors. But knowing that there are options, at least is good. And that brings me to sort of those first initial steps. Because as we're talking about here, it is a lot of magnification and getting down to at species can be kind of difficult, not to say it's impossible in many cases, but I would imagine most people that don't think about plants day in and day out would look at it and go, there's more than one kind of moss. So where do you begin when you start to look at these things? Like what are some important features to go out and start to recognize that there are a lot of different species out there? That's a good question. Where do I start with this? I would say first thing to do would to be to figure out what the common plants are in your um in your neighborhood in your backyard you know in the woods by your wherever's in your proximity um and a really amazing resource for that is iNaturalist um a lot of people who are already going out there and um posting pictures of moss they find and then experts like myself will go on and say hey this is this this this and ends up being a lot of the same stuff so you can kind of like a visual idea of what some of the common things are and you're looking at things like not great once you get more into learning bryophytes but color like it's more yellowy a little more green sometimes they have slight pink or purple tinges that's really fun with the sphagnum species um branching patterns um morphology of the leaves it's it's a very vast just like vascular plants very vast in terms of different you know typical expression of the look of the plant but once you have that base of the common ones, it's then easy to kind of look at, hey, this looks a little different than the common ones. Maybe it's something more unique, more rare, more fun. And then you can delve into it from there using your whatever resources you have at your disposal. Yeah, it really is about developing that search image, right? From what you're describing there is kind of know what is kind of there a lot, but then know what things aren't when you do come across something different. But the great thing is, is no matter where I go, and I would imagine many places in the world are like this, there's a moss at least, whether that's the center of an urban superhighway kind of thing going on or the most rural forested prairie, that kind of thing. There's always going to be a moss to look at. Yeah, even in the sidewalk cracks behind my house here, I live in downtown Edmonton, Alberta, and there's little bryam argentiums or tichostumum carbarum growing in the sidewalk cracks. They'll find a way. They're very capable little creatures. It's funny because I think when I first was being taught about these sorts of things, it was kind of pitched to me that mosses are these fragile, sort of tucked away. They need these specific microclimates. And in many cases, that's kind of true. But they're so varied, but so incredibly hardy in many instances, too, that I'm constantly just flabbergasted by where I find healthy looking moss patches. Yeah, I mean, mosses have incredible adaptive mechanisms that allow them to survive through like harsh, harsh, harsh conditions. As you know, like they don't have any vascular tissue, they don't have any like root structures, they don't have a lot of these features that vascular plants have that allow them to kind of thrive in a large way. So they have to be really in tune with their environment. So capable of drying out and then springing back to life once moisture is reintroduced into their environment, things like this that allow them to colonize like a sunbathing rock or a sidewalk crack again, or like along the highway, just kind of ridiculous, or even like the high Arctic is just absolutely riddled with moss, very extreme conditions up there, Antarctica, you know, mostly populated by mosses. That is really neat to think about is, you know, you read so many descriptions of vascular plants, at least, and even the cosmopolitan species, they're like, oh, they're everywhere except Antarctica, you know, and here we are with one of the most fundamental types of plants for so much of Earth's history in terms of, you know, they're not primitive. They are definitely not primitive. But there's been representatives of this group for a very, very long time. And they've kind of conquered the Earth as a result. And when you think about diversity, do they follow similar patterns? I mean, is it one of those things where like, okay, the poles maybe have a couple of species, but the equator has many, many more? Or do they kind of buck a lot of trends? It's definitely more diverse in tropical regions. like mosses again just not having any vascular tissues they're very dependent on the moisture of their environment so where you have more humidity more moisture for them to soak up you get incredible amounts of diversity for example bryophytes or what we kind of interchangeably can call moss is actually a group of three lineages so mosses hornworts and liverworts and hornworts are more considered like a tropical plant so like here in Alberta and Canada we don't really get horn war. It's really, really tragic, but you move down to anywhere more warm and you're going to have incredible diversity of this group. I was particularly lucky to go to Hawaii a few years ago and I was just floored by the amount of horn war diversity there just with the incredible amount of moisture there. I spent like two hours on one rock just looking at all the different horn war One day. Magical. That is truly magical And that makes me so happy because every time I talk to someone that passionate about plants likes botanizing it that how long can you spend in say the trail leading up to a trailhead the parking lot medians finding things And when you think about small plants especially, it can be a small of an area as a rock by a stream. It's like, okay, which sides you're looking at, how far up on the rock. and that magical unlocking of understanding these plants makes that such like a great experience to have when you start understanding how different these things are and then you can start asking okay who is it and why do i see them here and not here that kind of thing like it unlocks so many more questions about the environment that really kind of connects you to a deeper aspect of ecology and nature in general absolutely i would agree and it builds like a incredible appreciation for the world around us especially i think with mosses and that's why i'm so drawn to them just like them being overlooked and so tiny and so diverse in such small little areas it when you get down to the level of the moss and look at the moss diversity the liverwort diversity the hornwort diversity you're just like um absolutely rewarded with this wealth of beauty diversity and that you can you spend hours just captivated by the magic of them because they're just so gorgeous i think i went on a little bit of a tangent there but that's quite It rings true. And I think you're in good company for that kind of tangent. So do not feel bad. It's not moss. That's why you're here. When you think about all these tiny plants, though, you did mention two other groups that we were remiss if we didn't spend some time on too. And it is the liverworts and the hornworts. And I'm so happy you kind of justified why I'm not seeing as many hornworts in my day-to-day life. I had to go to the Southern Hemisphere to finally go, oh, there it is kind of thing. Those two, I think are a lot more like each other, just an overall appearance, but they are taxonomically different, right? So what kind of distinguishes, okay, what am I looking at here? If it's a tiny plant, is it a moss? Is it a hornwort? Is it a liverwort? If we're lucky enough to be in a place where you could have all three. Ooh, okay. Yes. So let's go through each one. Let's. They can be easily confused. They have a lot of similarities, but a lot of differences, obviously that make them distinctive groups. So mosses, I like to describe them as more kind of like a miniature vascular plants. They look something more similar to what you think of when you think of a vascular plant. So they may express a midrib or what we call in the briophyte world, a costa. They have leaves that are typically whirled around the stem. They'll produce, this is important for later, they produce stalks, which you can kind of, they're not flowers, but they're the reproductive stage of the moss, these stalks that produce a little ball at the top called a capsule that releases spores. So I like to, when I'm working with little ones, I like to kind of describe this as the flower of the moss, but definitely not, not a flower. Fair enough. But yeah, just kind of more like a miniature vascular plant versus our liverworts. They're actually incredibly diverse. We have our thaloid liverworts, which are going to be more similar to our hornworts. Thaloid liverworts are kind of just blobby growth. We refer to the body of the thaloid liverwort as a phallus. So kind of, yeah, it just looks like blob of green, which is really cool. And then they will interestingly produce stalks that are still, now we have to circle back a little bit to mosses, hornworts, and liverworts, what they all have in common is that they are haploid dominant. And again, this is along with having no roots, no vascular tissue, things like this, but they exist in the state of one set of chromosomes. So that's in contrast to any other plant, which is really incredible. So when they're reproducing, they produce this diploid generation, the sporophyte, the haploid generation called the gametophyte. And the sporophyte that produces the spores that continue the life cycle, again, are like the stalk and a little ball in our little mosses that are usually pigmented, things like this. But then in our liverworts, our thalid liverworts, you get a stalk, but it's made of comedophytic tissue. And those little sporophytes are usually produced underneath. And these kind of either like umbrellas or conical structures are really cool female receptacles. So that's really distinctive for them. So again, blobby, cool umbrellas to cones that are produced from them. But then you also have leafy liverworts. And leafy liverworts are typically really tiny. they often grow amongst the moss you're thinking like tiny little moss and then there's tiny little liverworts growing within the moss trying to keep as much moisture as possible um within its cells so it's a really fun advantage it has to growing in the moss it just kind of takes the moisture from well not from the moss but with the moss um but those guys are going to look a little more similar to our mosses and that they form actual leaves they're not this blob like growth um where they're distinctive is they'll never form a costa or a midrib and they often have notching on their leaves so if you think like a leaf of um any any vascular plant you know or just like a generic kind of like teardrop shaped leaf you might see like um a notch at the tip of the leaf in a liver wart so it kind of forms like two lobes if you will up to four lobes they have a lot of diversity as well um so those are those are liverworts two distinctive groups and their sporophytes are really distinctive unlike mosses where you get variability in your sporophyte generation where i mentioned there's this little ball the capsule there's all sorts of more morphological variation in the capsule but with um within mosses but within your leafy liverworts they're all the same so they produce these white little stalks um because the little spore ball the capsule is developed within the perianth or the female kind of protective structure of the leafy liverwort and And then it emerges once it's mature opposite to mosses, they kind of mature as they emerge. Anyway, so it's just this highline or clear stalk. I like to call them little noodles. For those of us who are learning, they're kind of cute because that's often the first thing you see. Like if you're looking at a nice decaying log, which is just a fun afternoon. So you've got tons of moss and liverworts growing on a nice decaying log. And the little leafy liverworts can be hard to find because they're so tiny. So if you see these little noodles and you know, if you trace it back down, you've got a little leafy liverwort on there. Very cute. And then they're topped with a little black ball. And the little black ball will split and release the spores, which is really cool. And then we have, there's lots of, lots more to that. Those are just some basic things about our mosses, leafy liverworts and thaloid liverworts. But then we also have our hornworts. And our hornworts, like I mentioned, very similar to our thaloid liverworts. It's very blob-like, just green, smooth, shiny, beautiful looking little blobs. But they'll produce these green stalks that are just like long erect stalks that split longitudinally to release the spores. And that's really unique to the hornworts. So that's how you know you have a hornwort versus a phallid liverwort. And then, again, those guys would be more easily confused. And then you have your differences between the moss and the leafy. Nice. Yeah? Okay. Yeah, no, that is an awesome summary of what can be a pretty complex because a lot of what you're talking about there helps you distinguish between species, the nuances in those structures. And I've always wondered, but never had the time or wherewithal to kind of look into it. Are we at that point in understanding these organisms where we kind of are able to ask those questions? Okay, why are these structures slightly different? Because it's so easy to say, oh, it's small, it's insignificant. And, you know, what could that extra lobe on a leaf or that ball versus the umbrella type thing make a difference? But when you think about the sort of fractal universe and scale everything down, the physics of air change, the physics of water change. They don't change in a real sense, but like it's much more viscous at that size. A little breeze can be like a lot. Are we asking kind of questions about sort of the adaptive nature, why these things differ in that way? Or is it still kind of at that descriptive stage of just like, we're happy people are looking? I mean, we're happy people are looking. Yes. But there is definitely research or like a knowledge base on like why these structures are the way they are. And a lot of it has to do with this, the moss survival in the environment in which it's kind of adapted to. So like morphologically being tiny is really like, like you're thinking like when I say tiny, I'm kind of calling like all bryophytes again, moss, liver, hornworts, liverworts, hornworts, like small, but you can get some that grow up to, you know, 10 centimeters, five centimeters. Then when I say tiny, tiny, like the ones that are just like a centimeter tall or half a centimeter tall, they're going to be growing in environments maybe a little more open, like on top of a rock again or on soil in a kind of arid environment where the, how do I explain this well? The boundary layer or the layer that they exist in where the air current or the airflow is very low to slow is going to be a lot smaller. so they have to kind of grow short within that enable which will enable them to preserve any kind of moisture that they have versus those taller mosses that we'll get in like forest floors and things like that they can grow a little taller because the boundary layer is going to be a lot a lot a little bit higher um canopy from the trees and stuff like that so that's like one example there's also like other examples of um again mosses that are more adapted to grow in more arid environments or dry environments, they tend to have little structures on them called papillae, which are cell wall thickenings and things like this that are little hair tips on the end of the leaves. Things like this all kind of act to slow down any kind of air that's passing by the moss so that it can maintain as much moisture as possible. Because again, they rely on that moisture for metabolism to survive for reproduction. So if they don't have moisture in their environment, They're not doing too well. They can survive through periods of desiccation, but they're not going to thrive for sure. But yeah, everything kind of all these different forms and things all have an adventitious role for the moss, depending on where it grows. Sure, sure. That is really neat to start thinking about. And, you know, we've spent some time on this podcast talking about plant architecture and plant sort of traits, the physical traits and how they can tell us about the environment, because that is really where selection is acting. It's acting on the traits because that's how this organism is interacting with its world. And getting a grasp on that for like a tree or, you know, a nice grass or something like that, you can kind of get your head wrapped around it because they're similarly dealing with forces that we can feel. But that boundary layer, that tiny area of difference when it comes to an organism completely dependent on how close is that water, right, is so incredible to start thinking about. And that's why when you start thinking about the diversity and where these organisms are growing, it just opens up a whole new door of appreciation for how natural selection, evolution, and the physics of nature and what it means to survive are acting on such a tiny organism. Yeah, at a very small scale. And yeah, they really got it right, though. So like mosses are like, in a sense, can be considered living fossils because since they're like radiation or evolution, they haven't really changed too much. They know what they're doing and they're doing a good job. Yeah, yeah. Good genetic memories, those plants. But, you know, when you think about how they get around, you've mentioned this alternation of generations, which is already one of the weirdest things you can think about as a human. And then you add to that, it's spores. All right. So there's dust-like particles that go out into the breeze and land, hypothetically could land anywhere, everywhere. Like when you think about niche space, right? There's a lot of things going on there too. And so how much does like substrate chemistry, you know, in terms of like what kind of rock can they grow on? Why do you see certain mosses on bark or more in bogs, that kind of thing? Like how much does that play with where we see these organisms? That's a really good question. Like some, I don't really have a good answer for that, to be honest. like some mosses just have preference for substrate. So you could have like a beautiful dichranium species that then you know produces its sporophyte releases its thousands of spores into the wind You know they produce these stalks up past the boundary layer then get caught into wind currents and they just happen to have to land on another decaying log to start colonizing and growing a whole new population of this plant. But these spores, they can land anywhere, and oftentimes landing into the soil bank, and what we call in the briophyte world the diaspora bank, And they can live and be desiccated or dormant for extended periods of time. And until the conditions are right, they will not grow. So until another log gets introduced into the environment or something like this. Yeah, that's kind of just how the most goes. So something you just said there is completely new to me, but I love the idea, if I'm understanding correct, is the diaspora bang. Like that to me is fascinating because yeah, it's not everywhere is going to be great. And sometimes you have to have like those windows of opportunity that don't persist nonstop in the environment. There might be a window there that is specific to spring or something like that. Let's unpack that a little bit more. What do you mean when you say diaspora bank? Yes. Okay, cool. Fun, fun. We can get into my master's research a little bit. Yes. so much like the seed bank the diaspora bank for mosses is um can be um sexual propagules so spores but it also can be what's really fun about mosses is they're fantastic at asexual reproduction um so oftentimes uh they can't they don't have the means to produce sexually because they need water their sperm is actually flagellated which is really interesting yeah so without that water introduced into their environment um they're kind of faced with stress and they need to keep growing um they've adapted to reproduce asexually. So this can be like through lots of different mechanisms, broken tips of leaves, little leaves can actually regrow a whole new plant. A little bit of stem, gemae, which are specialized asexual reproductive material, we often see in leafy liverworts, there's propagules or like bulbules, all different little like structures that produced on different types of mosses. These can all get introduced into the diaspora bank. They can exist for extended periods of time. I was really excited to do my master's research and working with Catherine Lafarge. She was particularly amazing to work with because her kind of pioneering research on the shelf life of diaspora banks or of mosses themselves was inspiring. She did a lot of work up in northern Canada, specifically at Sphere Draft Pass in Ellesmere Island, which is like on the northernmost island of Canada in Nineveh. and what she found when glaciers were retreating they were exhuming these pristine populations of bryophytes of mosses and she was actually able to regrow these mosses just in a growth chamber wow um so they were actually still viable they were under the ice for about 400 years is what they carbon dated them to and they were still able to grow oh which was just it was mind-blowing yeah that is insane um it was insane yeah so we took this concept and applied it to the work i was doing which was in the southwest west yukon there's these series of ice patches up there and they're so neat they're quite small like you could walk around them so they're not literally like glaciers they're like glacial remnants and they were first um discovered because as they were retreating they were exhuming archaeological um artifacts so like hunting technology and things like this from first nations people um millennia ago that were using these ice patches to hunt caribou because caribou would often hang out on the ice patches as summer refuge from biting insects in summer heat anyway so some of the researchers that are up there looking at all this cool ancient hunting technology we're like oh there's a bunch of moss coming out from underneath these ice patches what's going on here we should get Catherine involved naturally they knew of her and her work yeah so I actually took a bunch of samples at the retreating ice margins which was moss but a lot of I'm not gonna lie to you a lot of caribou poop as well right on digging in that get it very old so it was okay um it was pretty cool actually but yeah these pristine like completely preserved populations of moss and we did the same kind of thing we stuck them in the growth chamber a really simple experiment and um unfortunately i didn't get anything like catherine saw where i wasn't seeing like a whole stem regrowing a whole new plant but what i did get was incredible germination success from that diascore bank oh wow so we're having couples um And asexual or sexual, it's hard to tell at that scale because they're so tiny. But yeah, just like every culture that I had regrouped something. And we were able to carbon date this to about 4,000 years old, some of the samples we had. So it was like when I say they can withstand a lot and can stay dormant for extended periods of time, I'm saying like thousands of years. that i mean did you get goosebumps at these moments when you realize how old these things are and still absolutely viable waking up like all right where's where's breakfast yeah yeah it was i was really really it was remarkable i expected it but not in that way like not that old so i was really um definitely really mind-blowing um was really really proud of that work i did with katherine yeah yeah i can see why and what's really interesting too is the implications for these sorts of things because you you know this isn't the only interglacial period we've had there's been cycles of this and especially at the poles you see life retreating or you know getting buried under ice how does it get back there there's a lot of questions in ecology of how life returns to a an area that looks essentially scraped free of life and then you add to that okay what are those early colonizers like and how do they set the stage i I mean, mosses, liverworts, bryophytes in general are really important first steps in establishing soil, keeping erosion from happening, letting other plants get a foothold. So this is like first principles in successional ecology. And how does life return to a landscape like that? Yeah. And that was the other side of the studies we were doing was looking at the successional pattern as the ice is retreating. As these propagules are getting integrated into the environment, are we seeing the same kind of species that are developing in this kind of blank slate, glacial foreland? are they are like are they are these ancient old propyels now contributing to our current state or current environment and it statistically yes based on the based on the taxonomic composition of what we were seeing in the glacial foreland and then what was actually underneath the ice so yeah um bryophytes as pioneer species absolutely and glacial ice and what's being exhumed from underneath them as contributing to these assemblages of pioneer species. Yeah. Incredible. And yeah, thinking of the taxonomic side of things, you talk about like a serious filter effect of what can withstand that and come out on the other end with something alive, right? And were you seeing the same players kind of in terms of species identity, or at least taxonomic identity, that level you were getting to of like, okay, these are the mosses or bryophytes that can do this and they're the same ones that were there 4 000 years ago versus 400 versus today yeah exactly and they are the species that are like there's some more sensitive mosses that would not you would not see growing there like we didn't find any little liver warts within like 20 meters of the glacial margin but as you moved further away you start to get that development as like more succession has happened more time has passed since the that area has been exposed more plants have been able to develop but underneath the ice not so much um but there were some robust hardy species like serratidon purpureus polytricum juniperinum polytricum hyperborium these species that are a little bit more you know typically plastic or more resilient to um environmental constraints okay and what does phenotypic plasticity look like in a moss is it height is it you know different pigmentation is that sort of thing like what do you mean when you're talking about the traits that are plastic in these organisms yeah it absolutely can be height so you can see some species that are able like these ones are the most frustrating ones because they don't fit in our nice box because they are so variable so like serratidon is um i remember going botanizing with some other biologists when i was just learning my trade back in 2020 2015 actually my goodness i'm with botany 2015 when it was here in edmonton and um serratidon Pierperius, but someone had picked it up around Mount Robson. And this is someone like, like 30 years of experience, and they were confused by what it was. And a few others were also confused. And then eventually like, Oh, it's just a rabbit on. Now, um, it just was growing a little more kind of pinwheeled versus little like, more or less straight than it should have been. I was a little more green, we're used to it being a little more reddish. Um, you know, it's just the slight variations that can uh three for a loop with those guys i guess but yeah it's mostly color height leaf formation subtle things yeah you know all those things that keep you from becoming complacent in any way shape or form in your trade yeah but it's really fun though once you get like really good at moss and you can recognize the variability in a species like i was just this morning i'd be something called ditcher complex collie um for um research projects that's happening out in Saskatchewan and they had these seven samples and they thought they're all different species and five of them are Ditchy complexicollae. They just was growing, one was growing really tiny and like compact and the other one was really long and lanky. Clearly one is growing in a more sun exposed environment, probably more dry conditions. And then the other one was probably going closer to the base of a tree or maybe on the crevice of a rock. Yes. They just looked a little different. Yeah. And that appreciation too is why, you know, you go into an herbarium and you start to try to get an idea of a species and you kind of have to see that breadth of what that species can manifest given its different you know conditions and that's you know again it comes back to diversity evolution all these things that you know okay if it's doing well over here why is it not doing well over here and how do you explain that kind of thing and you know thinking about it from that perspective you know there's some mosses as we've talked about that are super adaptive and hardy and can be buried under ice for 4 000 years and then there's probably some that are a little bit more like early indicators of something's not going wrong. So, you know, people sometimes have a hard time getting their head wrapped around the idea of plants being in danger. But I would guess there are a lot of conservation concerns when it comes to biofights as well, too. Absolutely. Particularly in Alberta, we have a researcher here working at the Royal Alberta Museum, Dr. Richard Kaners, and he specializes in rare mosses. There's one species in particular, the Heller's apple moss. and it only occurs in very specific microhabitats in the mountains and the Rocky Mountains here. And he's studying their population decline and trying to figure out like what's causing it. And it's really difficult. He did a presentation for us with the Alberta Native Plant Council. A few actually this might have been last year, I guess, then. and he really like he had a wealth of data and it mostly it was attributed to um uh the industrial development that was causing the decline and just the loss of microhabitat um but these mosses like once they're so they're so specific to a certain niche they lose that niche they just can't continue to thrive so there are a few endangered species here in canada yeah I mean that's I'm glad people are looking at that sort of stuff because given the ease of overlooking for many it's so much easier to get your head wrapped around the fact that these could wink out in places and known would ever be the wiser unless you've had history there or people looking but you know I also think of every time I look at like a terrarium class or you know these sort of YouTube channels where people are going out and digging up mosses to bring back to put in And I mean, that is a practice that, okay, maybe isn't harmful in every instance, but that should be something people think about a little bit more ethically in terms of sourcing these things. It not always about let just go out and dig it out of the wild and bring it back because we think it pretty i mean that scares me definitely um because you don if you don know what you grabbing like so i i might go out and do that but i not saying anyone in particular yeah like so there a certain moss and we a lot of us know it because it's pretty ubiquitous um circumpolar species plurium shrubbery or big red stem um you can find that in a lot of ecosystems of four it's like a forest floor moss and it's beautiful and it grows huge mats and if you grab you know like a few stems of that guy he's not going to be detrimented he's going to be okay but if you're just going out and grabbing whatever you might you might be incidentally grabbing something rare something special especially to that environment and then again depleting that population so even when we're going out to sample the rule of thumb is less than 10 of the population so mosses are you know the little cushion of moss is like a handful you can only take a few stems in order to id them so just going out and collecting for the sake of art like you know it's fun to connect to nature and i get the allure there but it just is a little little alarming in some sense if you don't know the proper practice to do it so um something i try when i do my like moss outreach and stuff like that i like to i like to mention that actually because i know that's uh something people like to do. But you can find reindeer moss online, which kind of bugs me in our whole eye, the Cladonia lichen that's called reindeer moss. But whatever you can do to get your craft itch scratched without causing any kind of ecological harm. Definitely. Yeah. And I think that's coming back to it where ID really helps. Know which ones are common, which ones can withstand a little bit more of that, and which ones, hey, we don't bother that. And so coming back to that whole concept, But say the listener has a hand lens and they got their hands on a decent scope. Where do you begin with Moss ID? Like broad picture, what are some important features to think about? What should you bring back? And how do you start dissecting to get it under there to start really knowing what you're looking at? Yeah. Okay. So first thing, I would just go out with your hand lens and you can pick up a single stem. That's totally okay. and you want to bring this sample to your eye with the hand lens and just appreciate the leaf diversity you need to have a base like i want to suggest a like a flora so like a field guide would really be helpful here but unfortunately in a lot of a lot of regions there's there just aren't these resources so using whatever is closest to that um i think i might shamelessly plug my book please do yes yes um so uh a guide to the common mosses and liverworts of alberta is a book i recently published to kind of fill this gap because there was a lot of people that i encountered that wanted to learn moss they could be you know just um nature enthusiasts there are other researchers other scientists other ecologists just anyone really but there was just such a severe lack of resources and the ones that were out there the pictures were just outdated i guess for lack of a better word or just um hard to hard to get a grasp on what the species looked like like i had a hard time learning from these resources so i put this book out to kind of help with that so i guess i would put a little shout out there to anyone who is studying moss to like share your knowledge um with the community um don't you know hoard don't gatekeep the mosses um put out a resource it's really easy to self-publish um put pictures online um post on naturalist so that people can go out and kind of develop the sense of what's common, what to look for. So yeah, that would be the first step is try and get some resources that can help you identify the mosses that you're looking for. If you're at the next level, then it would be collecting that small sample size and dissecting them under your microscope. And this could be, this is a really fun task. A lot of people message me about this on how do you properly do this? And it's really hard, really hard skill, because mosses are one self thick, again, with them just being in tune with their environment, not being able to hold in any moisture, the moisture just goes right through their leaves. So that's why they need to be in these humid environments to passively accept moisture from their environment. Anyway, so you want to stack those leaves up on a micro slide, and use a razor blade and have it perfectly perpendicular and then cut down onto that leaf to get a perfect cross section of a one self thick leaf. And these leaves, you know, some of them can be big and a little more friendly to work with like sphagnum leaves I find kind of friendly yeah but something like a bryam these are really tiny like one one centimeter tall mosses those ones are a little less friendly a little a little harder to cut up or if anyone's familiar with the potty AC anything in the potty AC family these are kind of desiccation tolerant more arid environment mosses that have all these adaptations that allow them to thrive there I think like the little bumps I talked about earlier, the little hairs. Those are typically really, really small. So cutting those up can be really tricky. And then you want to get your slide underneath your compound scopes. You need a dissecting scope and a compound scope. You get your slide under your compound scope, and then you're actually looking at like the size of these cells, the ornamentation of these cells. So again, the bumps, are they like one big bump or does the lumen of the cell protrude into the bump? Things like this. And then using the flora of North America is going to be where you want to go next and using your keys to kind of taxonomically determine which species you have. It's a lot. It's not as easy as just going out, you know, with a pair of binoculars and being like, oh, that's that bird. That's a different bird. Yeah. A little daunting, but it's doable. It's doable. Take courses. I know I like I offer identification workshops to help kind of bridge the gap. like the lack of resources, the lack of like knowledge out there on mosses to help some of the researchers in Alberta, like Alberta is like 20% peatlands. There's a lot of people working on those again, because the oil and oil sands exploration up here. So it employs a lot of consultants and they need to know their mosses. And if we're not IDing our mosses properly, we're getting incorrect ecological signatures or like we're not interpreting environmental response properly. So stuff like that. Even just like a field ID course or, you know, follow your local biologist, find out who is doing biology out there and want to walk with them. I mean, most biologists are kind of weirdos. It's good company though. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I haven't met a biologist that isn't really like happy to share their knowledge or would love to go on a walk with somebody and show off all the beautiful mosses and really like, you know, open your eyes to the moss around you. So if anyone is in Alberta is listening and wants to learn some mosses, hit me up at Brittany the Botanist. I would love to take you on a walk. Awesome. Yeah. And those resources are out there. And it is it takes a little bit more effort. But I feel like someone that's like, hey, I want to get into this already is like willing to kind of put in a little bit more effort just because you've probably already kind of ventured into some world where identification and keys and books have at least taken up part of your life. And so, yeah, it is important. It's, you know, the internet makes it easier than ever. And I agree with you. I don't think I've ever met a gatekeepy, uh, biologist ever. Yes. Well, I will mention though, just cause you mentioned the internet, uh, hard to trust moss resources on the internet, especially if you Google image search, they're not always correct. So, um, Michael Luth out of, uh, he's out of Germany, I believe he has incredible pictures of bryophytes. If you just Google Michael Luth bryophyte plates, they're free. That's amazing. And there's overlap with us here in Canada. It depends on what region you're in, of course. But there are some good resources out there. You can't trust everything, but you can trust some stuff. Welcome to the internet. Yeah, right? Yeah. So with that in mind, you've plugged a little bit, but let's plug it again. If people want to find out more about what you're doing, you know keep a finger on the pulse of just what kind of social media outreach you're doing uh or pick up a copy of your book where do they go looking for those sorts of things oh yeah so just on my instagram page i did it all this book i did it all by myself i was a project i just got frustrated with um the resources of mosses out there and i'm like i'm gonna do something about this and so i spent many sleepless nights really happy nights illustrating everything taking pictures um creating keys um writing all the like field descriptions so it's meant to be just digestible for someone who doesn't have a microscope um you can find this book just on my instagram page at britney the botanist um i self-published through blurb so it's just available on blurb as well as um pdf and then also as a hard copy and the hard copy unfortunately is massive it started as i was gonna do i'm gonna do 100 species but then i was like maybe one more maybe one more and it got into i'm at once i was at 170 when i published it um so i'm hoping to do a smaller little pocket version but right now she's a she's a honker she's a textbook um but uh it's it's definitely helpful i've had a lot of good feedback on it that it's uh helped people with their taxonomic identification skills of their of their briophytes so yeah that definitely check it that's awesome and yeah I think it's one of those things like having a pocket guide is great but you know as someone like the world of science and stuff can kind of feel like a carrot in the stick you're constantly chasing something it's hard to kind of measure up to like what did I accomplish this year sort of thing so to have like a hunger of a book to be like I did that that's pretty cool yeah I'm pretty proud of it yeah that was quite a labor of love took about four or five years to do And yeah, I'm hoping to do one for the Arctic eventually with I have a friend, a very close friend that I actually met when I was studying bryophytes at the U of A, Erin Cox. And she actually studies bryophytes as well now up in the Arctic. Nice. We're both really passionate about Arctic environments. I'm hoping to get back into Arctic environments eventually because bryophytes are so diverse up there and there's very little research being done on the bryophytes. And it's particularly of importance when we think about climate change and what it's doing for our northern environments. So a guide to the briophytes up there would be, I think, really, really amazing. So stay tuned for that. Yes, please keep us posted. You should come back and talk to us about those adventures when they happen. Absolutely. I love that. Well, Brittany, this has been incredible. I just thank you so much for sharing your passion about briophytes and for singing their praises and getting people to look at them and care about them. you're doing excellent work and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us about it thank you so much thank you for letting me talk about it I mean this is my favorite thing to do well hey come back on all right take care yeah thank you all right phenomenal conversation I thank Brittany for taking time out of her busy schedule to talk with us and as always go check the show notes over at indefensableplants.com because that's where I put links so that you can learn more about this conversation and pick up a copy of her book. Even if you don't live in that area, there's plenty of resources in there to make it worth your time, and you're definitely going to learn something along the way. Once again, that is all over at indefensiveplants.com. While you're over there, look at all of the great ways you can help support this show because the Indefensive Plants podcast does not happen unless you support it. As I mentioned at the beginning, we have a Patreon where you can get access to an entirely separate podcast about gardening. That podcast is now available on Spotify if you sign up at patreon.com slash indefenseofplants. We also have copies of my book and customizable merch for sale, and those links are in the show notes as well. At the very least, make sure you hit that subscribe button and keep checking back in. Before I let you go, I do have a shout out to the latest producer on this podcast. A big, big thank you goes out to Tanya, who signed up at Patreon at the producer credit level. So Tanya is maximizing their support of the show. Thank you so much, Tanya. But that is it for this week. I thank you all for listening. Until next time, hang in there, stay healthy, and get outside if you can. This is your host, Matt, signing out. Adios, everyone.