Mosses of Cape Horn – Research on the Edge

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ambience: Chilean Wind

Braving 40 mile an hour winds on choppy seas might seem like conditions to avoid, but not for those seeking, of all things, moss. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. William Buck is a curator at the New York Botanical Gardens. He regularly travels to Tierra del Fuego in Chile at the southernmost tip of South America to study the mosses found there.

“My research is only done during their summers, which are about late November through early February, and, even then, most of the time the temperatures don’t rise above about 60, and it’s usually about continuous 40 mile an hour winds. It has quite a large number of mosses, which are found nowhere else in the world. The area is really quite small in terms of landmass, but it’s all islands. The plants have had to evolve to adapt to the environmental circumstances that are there, and immediately north of them it’s a completely different climate and geology, and so these plants are unique to this region.
In my fieldwork in southern Chile we go ashore, collect mosses. You just pick them up with your hand, put them in a paper bag, carry them back to the boat, and then they get numbered and dried. And then, eventually, when we come back home, I use the microscope for identification purposes and to start writing up descriptions. When you put a moss underneath a microscope to determine what the species is, the moss leaves are only a single cell thick, so you’re looking at the shapes of the cells, any ornamentation on the cells, differentiated kinds of cells in various parts of the leaf. There are a number of characters that allow you to separate major groups of mosses and see how they differ. Some of them are leaf shape. One is whether there is a nerve through the middle of the leaf or whether there is not and also just the branching patterns of the plants.”
Dr. Buck is working on a guide to the mosses of southern Chile, which are unique in the world. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.

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Mosses of Cape Horn - Research on the Edge

Researchers brave the wild conditions of Tierra del Fuego to learn more about mosses.
Air Date:08/25/2010
Scientist:
Transcript:

music
ambience: Chilean Wind

Braving 40 mile an hour winds on choppy seas might seem like conditions to avoid, but not for those seeking, of all things, moss. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. William Buck is a curator at the New York Botanical Gardens. He regularly travels to Tierra del Fuego in Chile at the southernmost tip of South America to study the mosses found there.

"My research is only done during their summers, which are about late November through early February, and, even then, most of the time the temperatures don't rise above about 60, and it's usually about continuous 40 mile an hour winds. It has quite a large number of mosses, which are found nowhere else in the world. The area is really quite small in terms of landmass, but it's all islands. The plants have had to evolve to adapt to the environmental circumstances that are there, and immediately north of them it's a completely different climate and geology, and so these plants are unique to this region.
In my fieldwork in southern Chile we go ashore, collect mosses. You just pick them up with your hand, put them in a paper bag, carry them back to the boat, and then they get numbered and dried. And then, eventually, when we come back home, I use the microscope for identification purposes and to start writing up descriptions. When you put a moss underneath a microscope to determine what the species is, the moss leaves are only a single cell thick, so you're looking at the shapes of the cells, any ornamentation on the cells, differentiated kinds of cells in various parts of the leaf. There are a number of characters that allow you to separate major groups of mosses and see how they differ. Some of them are leaf shape. One is whether there is a nerve through the middle of the leaf or whether there is not and also just the branching patterns of the plants."
Dr. Buck is working on a guide to the mosses of southern Chile, which are unique in the world. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation. I'm Jim Metzner.

music