Big little world
- POSTED ON: 4 Jan, 2020
- TOTAL VIEWS: 544 Views
- POSTED BY: Katie Bagli | Nidharshana Raju
- ARTICLE POINTS: 100 Points
Imagine you have entered the woods, dark and deep, the canopies of the dense trees filtering off much of the sunlight. The air is humid and every now and then clouds of mist swirl around. Where the veil of mist parts, you see that the trunks and branches are festooned with a green, velvety growth – moss. Strangely, the green velvet
seems to cover only one side of the tree trunk. It is the side the rain comes from. The sound of your footsteps is muted by the carpet of green moss under your feet.
Moss? What is moss? Here’s a little more about them. Once, done continue down below to read more about the world that mosses can actually contain.
Imagine if, quite by magic, you shrink until you are smaller than an ant.
Now you can enter a different forest — the micro forest of mosses. You find that all around are green shoots bearing leaves that absorb whatever sunlight is available and drink in the moisture. Some stalks that grow straight up without branching, bear capsules. They all look exceedingly pretty. The air above these mossy forests seems to be permanently turbulent owing to the rough surface they form. This is how the moisture from the higher reaches of air gets trapped into this special forest.
It gets more intriguing as you explore further. Suddenly, a foul smell penetrates your nostrils. It comes from a different moss plant. Before you can retreat from it, a monster-like arthropod – a springtail – rushes to the malodorous female moss plant as if it found the smell divine. The springtails carry out the job of what bees do to pollinate plants: they carry sperm from the male moss plant to the smelly female moss plant, just as bees help carry pollen to the stigma of flowers.
Watch out! A capsule just bursts open, shooting out tiny spores with great force that defies gravity. These spores will give rise to new moss plants.
Now, what if you exit this micro forest, turn into your normal self and go 470 million years back in time when the seed-producing plants you see today were not yet in existence? The landscape would be very different. Barren and rocky. But the mosses, one of the first land plants, would be there. You would see them clinging on to rocks with their root-like rhizoids, near streams and lakes. The rhizoids secrete organic acids that would actually dissolve rocks over the years, creating nutrient-rich soil and paving the way for the more complex seed-producing plants to evolve.