"When we look in new places we often find new things"

We're back! Apologies for the blogging hiatus. The posts will be back to clockwork in no time and in the meantime we have a super close-up look at epiphytic moss and lichen.

When you look closely, moss and lichen can provide habitat for many small organisms. Photo: Mind Media.

Richard Payne, Olga Belyakova & Yuri Mazei from Penza State University in Russia have just published some work looking at testate amoebae in epiphytic mosses and lichen. Testate amoebae are "are a diverse and abundant group of protists characterised by a hard shell".  These small organisms are beginning to be used as bioindicators because they respond to many different human influences ranging from air pollution, to agriculture and chemical weapons disposal.

Testate amoebae have a hard shell. Photo: Puppe et al. 2014.

As interested grows in this new field of scientific investigation, Payne and colleagues have been exploring the moss and lichen communities of trees in Russia to see if testate amoebae can be found there. Specifically, they investigated the habitat provided by moss and lichen on the lower tree trunks.

Boreal forest study site. Photo: I. Gueorgievskiy

So what did they find? The researchers discovered that epiphytic mosses and lichens are a very good habitat for testate amoebae. They found lots of generalist species and a considerable difference in species assemblages between lichen and moss habitat. They also found that there was greater species diversity in locations with greater moisture availability and also significant amoebae variability between different forests.  

The testate amoebae of Russian forest epiphytes. Photo: Payne et al. 2015.

To conclude, the authors state that "Epiphytic environments in forests are probably a comparatively widespread habitat for testate amoebae and are perhaps deserving of greater research attention than has thus-far been the case".

So, we can now add that to the list of research topics for the canopy world!