Forget March Madness and welcome Moss Madness!
Why be inside watching basketball when you can be outdoors observing moss? A sports fan I am not, but I’ll court bryophytes anytime.
Bryophytes are nonvascular plants that include liverworts, hornworts and the more familiar mosses. These rootless wonders can grow in all sorts of places with ease — places where plants with roots may struggle. These substrates include rocks, pavement, stone walls and other seemingly inhospitable sites. Mosses don’t flower, and reproduce via spores instead of seeds.
With noses literally to the grindstone, two budding bryologists found a unique specimen at Felix Neck last week. Yes, new discoveries can still be found in even the most visited places. Attached to an old concrete foundation, Greg Palermo and Margaret Curtain observed and identified a mysterious moss.
Tortula is a gorgeous green genus of mosses that contains a few dozen species. With a careful eye and a good microscope, Margaret and Greg were able to get the identification down to two possible species: Tortula muralis, commonly called wall screw moss, or Tortula plinthobia, which has no colloquial name.
Either find would be a good sighting, as neither have been identified on the Island before, nor are they widely known in Massachusetts, according to the Bryophyte Portal, the website of the Consortium of Bryophyte Herbaria.
The distinction between the two is, to be honest, very indistinct. Greg explains: “We need to wait a few weeks for the spore-releasing capsules to fully mature and show their peristome teeth. The teeth of T. muralis are markedly twisted, and the teeth of T. plinthobia are barely twisted.”
Who knew mosses have teeth?
These slight differences could only truly be appreciated by a fellow bryologist. Hedwig (not the snowy owl from Harry Potter) is a man who could have spent hours debating the twisting of teeth with Greg and Margaret, were he still alive. Johann Hedwig was an 18th-century German physician who dedicated his life to botany and the study of mosses.
Born poor in Transylvania, Hedwig showed an interest in mosses from childhood. He worked his way to a successful career in medicine for 20 years, until his botanic hobby became his calling and he dedicated his later life to becoming a master of mosses. Hedwig wrote the book — or at least two books — on magnificent mosses. He is credited with developing and naming a large number of species, including Tortula, and his legacy included plants named for him and the Hedwig Medal, which is given by the International Association of Bryology.
Mosses are a great organism to deeply study as Hedwig did — or search for, as Margaret and Greg are doing — or even for the neophyte, to observe and appreciate with the coming of the longer and warmer days of spring.
March madness will be over before you know it. For the basketball tournament, there will only be one winner. With moss, all of us who take the time for a walk among its green carpets should be declared champions.
Suzan Bellincampi is director of the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary in Edgartown, and author of Martha’s Vineyard: A Field Guide to Island Nature and The Nature of Martha’s Vineyard.
