How is moss formed?
Moss is a living plant and all living things come from other living things. For life is handed on from one generation to the next. The children of each generation are like their parents and a patch of velvety moss came from parent mosses. In time, it too will hand on life to a new patch of velvety moss.
Most of the mosses cah grow only in damp and shady places. We find them on the forest floor, on trunks and fallen logs, in rocky gorges and clinging to the stony ledges of waterfalls. Some nestle under the mountain snows and some float like sponges in the boggy swamps.
There are thousands of different mosses, each like a miniature garden. Some look like fairy bushes and some like baby vines. Some stand like midget trees in a crowded forest, topped with tassels and ferny fronds, or ruffled with leafy frills. Some look like a fat pincushion of vivid green velvet.
A carpet of moss may seem to bear daisies or green roses, apples or little peapods. But a moss plant has no true flowers or seeds. The parent plants provide a sperm cell and an egg cell for each of their children. The sperm and egg cell merge to form a cell from which the new plant grows however, the young moss plant develops through two separate stages.
One of the parent moss plants grows a fine green stem, topped with a package of egg cells. The other grows a fine green stem topped with a package of sperm cells. Some dewy morning, when' the moss is wet and slippery, the sperm cells break free. Each bas a fine hair which it uses to swim over to the egg cells. A sperm. cell merges with an egg cell and fertilizes it.
The fertilized cell now grows roots lets down into the mossy parent which produced the egg cells. It grows a fine stalk, topped with a capsule of spores. These tiny seedlets are finer than fine dust and their miniature box is fitted with a neat lid. When at last the spores are ripe, the lid pops open and off blow the spores on the breezes, like a cloud of misty powder.
The moss spores are small enough to float and drift in the air and the breezes carry them far from home. Some of them drift far out to sea. A few, a very few, of the tiny spores will finally land on the ground where they can grow. Each of these lucky spores will settle on a damp, shady spot. Soon it will spread into a velvet carpet, just like its parents.
The young plant anchors itself to the soil with little threads called rhizoids. These rootlets drink up moisture with dissolved minerals from the soil, but the experts say that they are not true roots. The velvety moss has no proper roots, flowers or seeds. Yet hundreds of millions of years ago it was one of the first plants to leave the sea for life on the land.