Chipmunk foot traffic both creates the gaps and disperses the moss that colonizes them

Evidence

It seems that the chipmunks in their workaday lives were making the small gaps we found in the moss turf, like potholes in a roadway. And with each traverse they regularly delivered a sprinkle of D. flagellare propagules from their toes. Here was the missing puzzle piece. So this was why D. flagellare was found only on top of logs. Only where chipmunks run back and forth making opportunities for a small moss to live. How amazing to live in such a world where order arises from the seeming coincidence of the smallest things. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 380

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The chipmunk as an unwitting keystone engineer — a whole micro-ecosystem shaped by rodent commutes — is a rich ecological-worldbuilding image for nature interpretation and for describing invisible interwoven causes.
• SEED: An essay on ‘disturbance at the micro-scale’ finding that mammals, not wind or water, run a small ecosystem offers a fresh way to teach landscape-as-palimpsest in the Reading the Landscape course.
• XREF: connects to: The same disturbance-diversity dynamics governing forest trees also structure moss communities on logs — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 371; Low-tech tracer beads reveal that moss turf traps wind-borne seeds that bare ground loses — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 231; Slugs passively pick up moss fragments in their slime as they travel — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 375

Broader Connections

• Slugs passively pick up moss fragments in their slime as they travel #corroborates (0.80) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 375