Sunday 3 May 2009

A bit of Moss

Yesterday was a pain computer wise so today could only get better. I had decided to replace my old LCD monitor with a new wide screen one. It duly arrived and I followed the instructions and connected it up. It worked OK but the graphics card would not give me a wide screen choice so everything was stretched sideways. It took three hours to find the correct up to date driver from the manufacturers site and even that took a tortuous route to get working but in the end all was well. Come back Atari, all is forgiven.

Some days ago when I was pottering round the garden I spotted moss growing on the rotting remains of a wooden post in a 2"x2" Metpost.

Moss 01

At first the idea was just to get a photo for the record but then I wanted to get a closer look. A while ago I bought a second hand Digital Blue USB microscope as I had seen reasonable write ups of its ability. It is really classed as a toy but for certain things it works fairly well. For focus the stage moves up and down but as everything is plastic it can stick and suddenly jump past the optimum focus point so you have to keep going up and down until it stops in the right place.

USB Microscope

Another annoying disadvantage as far as I am concerned is the way it changes the screen to a lower resolution. Not a problem in itself as it brings back the original resolution when you exit the program - but - in lowering the resolution Windows then shuffles my desktop icons about and I like them in certain groups on the screen.

So, I pulled a small piece of the moss and took a photo with the Canon which shows all the parts which go up to make this particular moss. The moss is about 40mm tall, just under 2 inches. On backyardnature.net I found this drawing which labels the various parts nicely.

Moss 01 Moss 01

Now to the Digital Blue microscope which has three settings for magnification. Here is the leaf section at 60x magnification which shows some of the cell structure.

Moss 01

Here are some capsules at 10x magnification ....

Moss 01

....and a couple of views of a capsule at 60x magnification.

Moss 01

Moss 01

The capsules only appear at a time of year when the conditions are right for the moss to reproduce and contains the spores for starting new plants. The rest of the year only the leaf section of the moss will be seen.

I spent ages trawling the net trying to identify which moss this is - to no avail. My closest guess at the moment is that is may be in the group Dicranella but that was as far as I could get.

This microscope also has a 200x magnification which personally I find gives poor results, especially on 3D subjects like this but may well be better for looking through thinly sliced specimens but I don't think the optics are really up to the job.

11 comments:

  1. Have too much of this stuff on my lawn but still enjoyed looking at it on your post! excellent images.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very interesting post and fascinating images. I think the moss might be Funaria hygrometrica a.k.a. common cord moss, which often grows on the sites of old bonfires and on the surface of heat-sterilised potting compost. When the capsules are ripe they go orangy-brown and the capsule stalk curls over. The British Bryological Society has an excellent web site at http://www.britishbryologicalsociety.org.uk/ with a free downloadable identification guide to mosses and liverworts of towns and gardens, under the 'Learning More' tab.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good results for a 'toy' John.
    Looks to be an interesting bit of kit.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I had a chuckle about your Atari comment! They were good computers for that time. My chief complaint was the number of times I got so involved with recording or scoring music that I forgot to save and then "something" happened and I lost hours of work!
    The moss photos are fascinating.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks Chris. My lawn is at least 50pc moss at the moment.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks Greenfingers. I had already been to the BBS site but missed the Learning More section though I did download the preliminary field guide. As with everything else it seems there are thousands of variations and most confusing for my remaining grey cell. :>)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Sometimes it produces reasonable pictures Keith, other times they are awful though that could be down to operator error!

    ReplyDelete
  8. I still miss the simplicity of use with the Atari ST, Mick. I had 4Mb of memory and two 48Mb hard drives. Mind you, not so long ago I found the receipt for the first hard drive. Somewhere over 500 pounds for 48Mb. I used to produce the parish and village magazines on that setup.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Another interesting post, MJ. I remember some fragments of moss anatomy but never knew that bit of the capsule was called the 'urn'. Not that I'm a golfer but your pic of capsules together reminds me of a set of clubs.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Very interesting stuff John, that last photo reminds me of some sort of strange bug-eyed monster! You are welcome to come and collect as much moss from my lawn as you would like for your experiments! :-D

    ReplyDelete
  11. Rob: Yes, it does remind me of golf clubs!

    Jan: Now would I deprive you of the pleasure of examining and writing about your own moss? Kind offer though. :>)

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for visiting. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. Any comment, or correction to any information or identification I get wrong, is most welcome. John

Related Posts with Thumbnails