Moss colonies establish only through a rare, poorly understood succession

Evidence

Even with a watering system, the green carpets envisioned by the owner would take generations to grow. In fact, growth itself was not the issue. The critical step in moss growth comes at the birth of a colony. I’d spent considerable effort in researching how mosses decide to take hold of a rock. We have an idea of “how,” but the “why” is very poorly understood. Wind-blown spores, finer than powder, must be stimulated to germinate by just the right microclimatic conditions. Raw rock is inhospitable to mosses. The surface must first be weathered by wind and water, and then etched by the acids produced by a lichen crust. The spore then forms delicate green filaments called protonema, which attach firmly to the rock. If they survive, tiny buds will form and sprout into leafy shoots. In experiment after experiment, we see that the probability of a single spore ever producing a single moss shoot is vanishingly small. And yet under the right circumstances, and given enough time, mosses will blanket a rock, like the old stone slave fence. So creating a colony of moss on a rock is no small feat, a mysterious and singular phenomenon which I have no idea of how to reproduce. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 519

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘why’ mystery of moss settlement plus the slave fence cameo is a natural-history essay seed on what ‘taking hold’ means ecologically — patience and succession over engineered control.
• XREF: connects to: Folk recipes for growing moss rest on real fragment regeneration — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 524; One moss species grows only on four-week-old deer droppings in July. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 487; Old-growth moss mats cannot reestablish because only young twigs offer footholds — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 614 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Old-growth moss mats cannot reestablish because only young twigs offer footholds #expands (0.82) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 614
• Old-growth moss communities embody centuries that no technique can compress #expands (0.75) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 535