Reflections on the life cycle of moss and lichens by Talia Levin
Nature Affects Our Hormones and Changes Our Microbiome.
Lately, I’ve been looking at the life cycle of moss. I found myself instantly lost in a thicket of botanical terminology—from the blunt, one-syllable, like clade, to the marvelously complex, like perichaetia, nematodontous, chemoheterotrophic. The words are alien, and for a mind long distant from any formal study of biology, the concepts are, too: the dissemination of spores on the wind to be received by other strange organs, and the spreading, season by season, on inhospitable soil, on rock, on rotting wood, in the arctic and the forest and by the salt sea.
On Moss, Rock, Lichen, and Survival by Talia Levin.