Tentacle

The Call of Cthulhu, vegan edition.

Moss are often underrated. Sure they don’t have big colourful flowers, they don’t produce tasty fruits neither and are hardly edible at all (though you can find alcohol made with moss). However they are very interesting for their resistance to dessication, as well as their ability to store some pollutants, like heavy metals or radionuclide, thus acting as bioindicator of pollution in an area.

Moss play also a key role in the creation and protection of soils. For example after a forest fire they contribute to fix the soils which would be otherwise washed by the rains and thus sterilized. They contribute also to plant colonization of new spaces which were sterile before. You can easily see it in your direct surroundings : winds bring dead leaves on a sterile surface (rooftop, concrete courtyard, etc.); those leaves decompose and create a small amount of humus, which retains morning humidity, creating good condition for moss; then moss appears and by its presence, as an obstacle, it retains more water and nutriments, which allow more moss; the cycle continue and after some time bigger plants will be able to grow from this substrate.

There is around 12000 species of Bryophyta, I don’t know precisely which one of those is this one. The “tentacles” are sporophytes, the part of the plant which produces spores (hence its name).

Funny useless fact: in the French Republican calendar, there was a “day of the moss” around February.

Tools and exifs:

• Canon EOS 450D + Canon 18-55 IS
• 55mm
• 1/30 s.
• f/5.6
• ISO 400