Mystified by Mosses

Earlier this week I discovered a community of mosses living on an old cement curb. I revisited them with the lofty idea of taking a sample or three back to the house and identifying them.

After all, how hard could it be to identify a moss?

Unknown Moss #1 - Grimmia sp?

Mosses are Tough to Identify

Armed with the RBCM handbook Some Common Mosses of British Columbia (WB Schofield) and my own naivety I quickly discovered I was in way over my head. It was fortunate that we have two both a dissecting and compound microscope at home as both are very useful when attempting to  identify mosses. It was unfortunate that these didn’t help me to figure out what the mosses actually were.

Unknown Moss #1 (Grimmia sp?) Microscope photograph of leaves and sporangia.

After close to an hour looking at the first moss under the microscope, my wife Jocie,  asked  me why I had chosen such difficult mosses to identify. She should know, since she’s taken courses specifically on mosses at UBC. She also has a collection of mosses and liverworts that fills 17 shoe boxes on a top shelf in our guest room closet.

Unknown Moss #2

Some Moss Features

Working on the second moss that I had collected, I again examined it under the microscope and tried to pick out features that would help me identify it. What I learned was that things that I thought were distinctive didn’t really help me too much. I made little progress.

Unknown Moss #2 - Microscope photograph of leaves and sporangia.

However, despite the fact that I was no closer to identifying this second moss I was still enjoying myself. The leaves were pretty neat to look at under the microscope and occasionally I would notice very small insects scurrying out of the moss itself. They didn’t really have anywhere to go since they were in a petri dish but hopefully they’ll survive until I return the moss to the curb.

Unknown Moss #3

The third moss in my collection mystified me as well. I think that at this point in the evening I had given up trying to pin a name on the moss. I began to admire it for being so common while at the same time being so complex as to defy my pathetic attempt to identify it. Some things are better appreciated for their simple beauty.

Jocie’s advice was to stick with the bigger and more easy to identify mosses when starting out and I think that’s what I’ll do!

Macro Monday