A little twist to the left has put a Western Washington plant ecologist and a moss species that she discovered in the North Cascades into the record books.
Although mosses are usually associated with the forest ecosystem, Robin Lesher found an unidentified moss in glacial rubble at nearly 6,000 feet elevation on Snow King Mountain in the Glacier Peak Wilderness of Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.
The forest ecologist has been working with Forest Service ecologist Jan Henderson since 1984 inventorying the plant communities in the Olympic and Mount Baker-Snoqualmie national forests.
The new moss was in an area “covered by permanent snowfields or a glacier as recently as the early 1900s,” Lesher said.
The Little Ice Age event from 1400 to 1850 was the most recent glaciation of the North Cascades.
“The way you can tell is the raw, barren, rock rubble now. There’s very little vegetation growing.”
Her moss, now named Grimmia lesherae, was a blotch of green on a light-colored granite boulder, just one of dozens of mosses collected from the sample plots.
One of the largest moss genera, Grimmia are little cushions or tufts of mosses that typically grow on rock, often in harsh surroundings.
“I had no idea at the time that it was anything new,” said Lesher, who was in the area on an eight-day ecological inventory in the remote area, collecting and bringing specimens back to the lab for identification.
That was in 1998. The tiny moss, less than a centimeter tall, went unidentified for years, although Dr. David Wagner of the University of Oregon’s Northwest Botanical Institute knew that it was at least rare, because it had a left-handed twist to its sporophyte stalk, the stem that bears the seta (spore capsule).
All other Grimmia twist to the right.
Eventually the tiny moss was sent to internationally known Grimmia expert Henk Greven in The Netherlands.
“He had looked at over 20,000 species, several thousand in North America, and had never seen anything like this,” Lesher said.
But on a recent trip to California, Greven looked for another Grimmia species on Mount Shasta and found Lesher’s moss instead.
“It could occur down the crest of the Cascade range, but not many people are out in those areas surveying for mosses,” she said.
Greven named the plant after Lesher and wrote about the species in his recently published book “Grimmias of the World.” He wrote that the species may be an intermediate species between two divisions of mosses, “bringing in question the division of the genus,” she said.
At lower elevations, mosses are underappreciated players in the forest ecosystem. They can colonize some habitats where other species can’t grow.
“One of the ways they do that is they get all their nutrients and water from the atmosphere. They don’t really have true roots; they’re like sponges that way … that’s why some are successful in the crowns of trees.”
Mosses provide forage for invertebrates and nesting material for birds and small animals, intercept nutrients, provide soil-building material when they decompose, act as a slow-release mechanism that helps control moisture and humidity, and are collected for horticulture uses.
But some survive at high, barren altitudes.
“It most certainly didn’t persist under the ice so it moved in once the glacier pulled back. Spores could have blown in.”
Lesher said she hopes to return to the remote backcountry area to look for more Grimmia lesherae.
It will be the one with the left-handed twist.
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.
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