Get Into Moss

Here she is folks! A beautiful yellow-green pleurocarpous moss, which means it tends to be creeping rather than being straight upright and it has its sporophyte coming from a sideways bud on a branch rather than at the top of a branch.

'Yellow-horn'.

Hornworts are a Division of non-vascular land plants with an elongated horn-like diploid sporophyte at some points of the year, and a flattened green gametophyte stage that only contains one copy of the genome. Liverworts and mosses are similarly dominated by the gametophyte stage. Spores in this genus are yellow - hence the name.

Hornworts may be found worldwide, usually in damp or humid areas. Some are weedy in gardens and fields, and large tropical and sub-tropical species of Dendroceros may grow as epiphytes. Uniquely among land plants, some hornworts have an organelle and biochemistry that can concentrate CO2 to over 50 times atmospheric levels. Many have slime-filled cavities that are colonised by nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria like Nostoc.

The total number of species is uncertain - more than 300 names have been published, but the number of actually valid taxa may be a third of that.

How can I refuse! Absolutely!!! It sounds kind of ridiculous, but it's actually very sad.

So, let's start off with some numbers. Every year, the moss black market is estimated to garner up to $165 million for trafficking approximately 82 million pounds of moss.

I cannot even wrap my mind around how much moss that is.

You might ask, why does moss poaching exist and why is it so lucrative? Well, the quality that has made mosses the prey of an illegal trade is simply their aesthetic appeal. Soft, velvety, and moist, mosses are extremely pleasant to the touch and calming to look at. Some people are willing to pay large amounts of money to collect them and put them in private gardens. However, most of the mosses that move in this underground black market are actually sold to companies/wholesalers for use in potting/gardening soil, plant nurseries, decor, and as craft materials. The majority of the preserved mosses in your run-of-the-mill chain craft store, planters, floral wreaths, or very-much-dead living wall decorations are gathered illegally, bleached to death, and then dyed green. This goes for a lot of prepackaged peat moss and soil mix blends as well.

Even though it is illegal to gather moss in public places (in the US, at least), people still harvest it. Why? Probably because there's a fair amount of money to be made and the consequences are very rarely enforced, and when they are, they are quite light--usually a $50 fine at worst if you're caught. Most of this black market moss is actually poached from the national park system, with Appalachia and the Pacific Northwest usually being the hardest hit regions.

Mosses play vital roles in many ecosystems, provide homes for threatened species, regulate water distribution in forests, and help with erosion, so their loss is a terrible blow. Additionally, moving such large quantities of mosses from one location to another may spread unwanted, invasive hitchhikers, like insects that lay their eggs in the plants, or even seeds and spores.

I'll end on this thought:

It can take 20 years for a small patch of moss removed from a fallen tree to grow back with the right moisture conditions.