Saturday, April 5, 2025

Goblet Mosses


After the last post's exploration of the springtails and other delights to be found by closely examining mosses, last week brought a crazy eruption in some of the mosses growing in the gravel Lehman Ave. extension near the Sycamore Apartments. 

Goblet mosses, or urn mosses (tentatively Physcomitrium pyriforme), are fairly subtle for most of the year, but when they are ready to release their spores in the spring, they produce bladderlike capsules atop thin stalks that are a little more eye-catching (relatively, as mosses go, I suppose). Like other mosses, their lifecycle is quite different from what we might imagine based on most of the plants we encounter.*

A cluster of balloon-like sporophytes.

Mosses are non-vascular, non-flowering plants that have two basic life phases:

  1. Gametophyte generation. This is what we normally picture when we imagine moss: the plain, low-growing mats of tiny leaves. It is a haploid generation** that will produce shoots bearing either an archegonium that contains eggs or an antheridium that produces sperm. Water, via rainfall or other methods, can help the sperm make its way to an awaiting egg. Once fertilized, the moss will transition to its
  2. Sporophyte generation. This diploid generation is names after its sporophyte, the structure that carries and later releases its haploid spores to the world, which will grow into a new gametophyte generation and start the process all over again. 
The balloonlike capsules here are the sporophytes, held up by the stalk, technically called the seta. The cup-like capsule has a lid (the operculum) that will fall away and allow the spores to disperse. 

While we eagerly await the spring flowers and shows reproductive organs, it's a neat reminder that there are many other reproductive strategies in the world of plants.
Threadlike setae hold the sporophytes aloft.


*Did I resort to searching "moss lifecycle for dummies" in researching this? Yes I did. 
**  If you remember high school biology, haploid refers a cell or organism with just a single set of chromosomes. Our gametes—reproductive cells like sperm and egg—are haploid, each containing a single set of the chromosomes that combine into a diploid cell with two complete sets of chromosomes. 


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Saturday, February 1, 2025

"Who cares about tiny non-insects...?"

 If you had any idea the number of photos I take on the Greenway every time I go out, compared to the number of photos I actually share, you would be forgiven for thinking I'm a truly terrible photographer who happens to catch a few lucky shots here and there. The sheer volume of photos (thank goodness for digital cameras) that are out of focus alone... but also those that capture a bird looking the wrong way or flying out of frame, or a breeze blowing a flower and its insect passenger aside just as I click the button, or the interesting-looking thing off in the distance that turns out to be a clod of dirt. Embarrassing. 

But sometimes, sometimes...those wasted shots turn out to be a little more interesting than they seem at first glance. 

Take this one:


Okay. Moss. It's fairly green for the middle of January, which is kind of nice. The rocks and twigs lend a little bit of texture and visual interest. But zooming in, it's not too crisp and just kind of meh. Delete.

But hang on—what was that? Just a glimpse as the deleted image disappeared off my screen. Fortunately I still had the backup file....zoom in....



Who are those?! Chunky little gray-blue bodies with plump abdomens, segmented like tiny Michelin men, out and about on a below-freezing Iowa afternoon. Scrolling back and forth yielded several more:



Springtails? I'd encountered similar chubby soft bodies previously on the Greenway, in a watery area near the Great Snail Crossing. iNaturalist suggested several types of springtail as an ID, including Moss Springtail (Neanura muscorum, which seems to be native to Europe, introduced in the U.S.) and Hypogastrura, a genus with dozens of species including several that "are active in winter and are called 'snow fleas'", according to BugGuide. Barely being able to see them, much less notice such diagnostics as furca length (?), anal spines (!), and number of "ocelli in each eyepatch", I shall have to leave the ID at "some kind of springtail, maybe Hypogastrura."

Who cares about tiny non-insects that you can barely see? — Anyone who wants nature to work! 

Missouri Dept. of Conservation 


Springtails are hexapod arthropods, but not insects; like insects, they have six legs and three main body parts (head, thorax, abdomen), but they lack wings and have internal mouthparts rather than the external mouthparts of insects. They are tiny, usually just a couple of millimeters long, and they tend to hang around moist areas where they will eat decaying plant matter, mold and fungus, and assorted other organic detritus (they are also often cited as an excellent "cleanup crew" for terrariums).

The common name "springtail" comes from their furcula, a forked "tail" normally held tucked beneath their abdomen that can be deployed to fling them several inches into the air when they are bothered (imagine one of those spring-loaded mousetraps that jump into the air when triggered— but it would have to jump more than 16 feet in the air to proportionally equal the "spring" of a springtail!).

So next time you are out and about and think there's not much to see...slow down and take a very close look at moist areas: under logs on the ground, mossy patches, water surfaces. You might find a little neighborhood of life you had no idea was there! 

Watch springtails jump:





Resources/Additional Reading

Saturday, December 7, 2024

"But we have curbside recycling!"

If you caught the post about the recent trash cleanup on the Greenway last week, you may have noticed that a huge amount of the litter picked up was beverage containers: pop bottles, beer cans, energy drink cans, sports drink bottles, and more than anything flimsy water bottles by the dozen. 

If you spend much time detrashing roadsides around your neighborhood, you can probably attest to the same. Modelo cans and Busch Light bottles spring up like mushrooms...and how the heck are there so many cups from the Wendy's almost a mile away?

This blog has been complaining (venting?) about litter along the Greenway and elsewhere for years. Litter is highly visible—to those who are around to see it. But for many people, a can or bottle here and there scarcely registers as they speed along in vehicles. There is an assumption that litter-prevention programs like our Bottle Bill are no longer necessary, because we have curbside recycling programs that take care of the problem. They claim it's an obsolete law, a relic from a simpler time that doesn't work for today's world. Is it?

A sampling of the beverage containers from the latest Greenway cleanup.

Hardly. It's more necessary now than ever. There are more cans, more bottles, more different drinks sold in those small containers than ever before. And they're still often consumed far from trash cans and recycle bins. And they still find their way onto roadsides and public spaces in huge numbers. The Iowa City Litter Crew collects data from cleanups on Open Litter Map, an open tracking system that lets users upload and tag photos of litter they encounter, and provides just a glimpse of the scale of the problem, in hard data.

Each of the green dots is a piece of
litter that has been picked up and tagged. 

Anyone can download the global data from Open Litter Map and create their own visualizations, like this one showing deposit vs. non-deposit containers picked up in Iowa City (if the map below doesn't show you can click here to open it):


Expand those hundreds of icons to other areas of Iowa City; to the metro region; to other cities in Iowa; to busy stretches of highway between those cities...and you can begin to see the scale of the problem.

Iowa's Bottle Bill created a financial incentive to ensure that cans and bottles found their way to proper disposal. The problem is that the law has been rendered ineffective, either through neglect or through a willful effort to undermine it at the behest of, let's say, those who aren't out there picking up litter on the roadsides with us every week.

For one thing, a nickel ain't worth what it used to be. Plug $.05 into an inflation calculator and you'll find that a deposit would need to be $.22—almost a quarter!— to have the same impact in 2024 as it did when the law was passed.  In 1979, you could collect five bottles to redeem, and with the quarter you received you could buy yourself a nice candy bar. Today? You'd need to collect 36 bottles!* 

One of the 50+ water bottles collected
at the last cleanup.
Our Bottle Bille also doesn't cover some of the most common items: water bottles. They weren't around in 1979, and our lawmakers apparently don't consider them to be a problem worth making the effort to address. Other states have modernized their Bottle Bills, increasing the deposit to $.10 and including water bottles and other single-use containers that join the alcohol and fizzy-drink containers that our law encompasses. 

And those updates clearly make a difference. A 2022 report shows that only 49% of Iowa's deposit containers are recovered. And while that is significantly better than the 25% recovery for non-deposit containers nationally, it lags far behind states that have more robust programs (Oregon, with a 10-cent deposit and a robust redemption infrastructure, leads the way with a whopping 86% recovery rate).

I'd like to assign every legislator, every citizen, who believes the Bottle Bill to be unnecessary a stretch of busy road to keep clean. I'd ask them to log the litter they find on Open Litter Map, and review the data for their patch and other areas around town to see exactly how pervasive the problem is. And then I'd ask those lawmakers to increase the deposit to a quarter (though I'd be willing to settle for a dime) and include water bottles and sports drinks. I'd ask them to make sure redemption is simple and fast, and I'd ask them to use funds from unredeemed containers for neighborhood cleanup efforts. 

And yes, with the current legislators in our state that may be a fantasy. But when we document the problem, we are creating data that other decision-makers can use in support of solving a problem at its source—the industry that creates the waste and the people who consume the products—instead of leaving it to be handled by regular folks who just want to keep their neighborhoods clean. 

You can help collect that data as well: it's as simple as snapping a photo with your phone and uploading to the Open Litter Map, tagging it with the type of litter and brand. Check out the Quick Start Guide the IC Litter Crew has put together for a walk-through, or attend a meetup with the group. 



*Economists may note that the size of a candy bar has increased since 1979 as well, from an average 1.2 ounces in 1978 to 1.55 ounces for a Hershey bar today. Adjusted for that size difference, you'd still need to collect a whopping 28 containers at a nickel apiece to buy a candy bar of the same size as a 1979 bar.


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