The Amazing Jumping Snails

**SPEAKER_1** (0:08)
You're listening to Strange by Nature, your guide to the strange, weird, unbelievable and improbable wonders of the natural world.

**Kirk Mona** (0:23)
Hello, everyone, and thanks for being here today. I'm Kirk Mona, and joining me are Rachel Gimza and Victoria Thompson. We're all naturalists who together have scoured the world for weird and wonderful wonders, just to please your mammalian brain's desire for novelty. Isn't that nice? Let's do this.

**Rachel Gimza** (0:42)
Well, I get to have a welcome everyone to the show. I was so excited. I get to start us off this week, and I'm really excited about my topic, and it's super nerdy. So I'm really happy to have both of you here to join me on this, what I think is a really nerdy topic. And it's a pretty naturalist-y type topic. So to get us started, I'd like to share a quote from Robin Wall Kimmerer. All right. It will make sense, this topic, because I'm currently reading the book that this quote comes from. And it says, she says, Focus the lens on the wallpaper itself. And the green blur of the background resolves itself into a sharp focus. And an entirely new dimension appears. The wallpaper, which seemed at first glance, to be of uniform weave, is in fact a complex tapestry, a brocaded surface of intricate pattern.
I took a couple of words out because it would spoil a little bit.
But this comes from her book.

**Kirk Mona** (1:59)
A little obfuscation going on.

**Rachel Gimza** (2:00)
A little bit. This comes from her book, Gathering Moss, which was actually her first book, before Braiding Sweetgrass. And today, I wanted to talk about moss.
Nice.

**Kirk Mona** (2:13)
All right.

**Rachel Gimza** (2:14)
Somehow, we have not talked about moss once, so let's talk about it.

**Kirk Mona** (2:18)
That's astounding. Okay. Right? Very cool.

**Rachel Gimza** (2:20)
Right?

**Kirk Mona** (2:21)
Moss is amazing.

**Rachel Gimza** (2:22)
It really is. So we all hopefully have a mental idea of what a moss looks like. When you see, when you think of moss, hopefully our brains are like, oh, yeah, that thing, that's moss. Short. It's short, small, green, on the ground. A lot of people actually mistake it for lichen or liverworts or other things. But we're going to go through and give a base understanding on what moss is. Okay?
Now, there's no way that I can cover the entirety of moss in just like the five, 10 minutes that I have here. So we're going to go through the basics.

**Kirk Mona** (3:00)
Okay. Just give us the strange bits.

**Rachel Gimza** (3:02)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, there's one particular thing that I wanted to talk about, which is why I brought this up in the first place.
Gathering moss was a starting point, and then I found out something really cool that actually just happened. We'll get to it. So moss is actually a whole division of plants, which is like a whole section within a clade in the bryophyta clade. Okay.
Which in classification terms is like one thing right underneath the kingdom of plantae. So we have kingdom. We talked about this before. This is like a clade. It's like a mixture between. It's a division within the division within right underneath the kingdom. It gets real complicated, really fast.

**Kirk Mona** (3:50)
That totally cleared it up for everyone.

**Rachel Gimza** (3:53)
Didn't it? Okay. So pretty much it's right under kingdom. Okay. So it's a huge group before phylum, but after kingdom. So it's huge. Okay. Very large. This is the same group that has liverworts and hornworts, which are different categories that we can talk about in a different episode, because they're also bizarre. So, bare basic bones. Mosses are defined by having simple leaves that are mostly one cell thick. So tiny.
They are attached to a stem.
That's it. That's moss.

**Kirk Mona** (4:38)
So, tiny.

**Rachel Gimza** (4:41)
A stem.

**Kirk Mona** (4:41)
Not only tiny in length, but thin. Thin. Thin leaves attached to a stem.

**Rachel Gimza** (4:47)
Yes.

**Victoria Thompson** (4:48)
That's it.

**Kirk Mona** (4:49)
That seems too broad.

**Victoria Thompson** (4:50)
So, I don't want to spoil your episode here, Rachel, but the thing I remember about mosses is they're nonvascular, right?

**Rachel Gimza** (5:01)
Yes.
So, like I said, that's it. They don't have roots. They don't have a vascular system. You're right.

**Kirk Mona** (5:08)
And they don't...

**Victoria Thompson** (5:09)
That's plant veins for...

**Rachel Gimza** (5:10)
Pretty much.

**Victoria Thompson** (5:11)
The non-science-y people.

**Kirk Mona** (5:14)
The little lines you see through the leaves.

**Rachel Gimza** (5:17)
It's what brings nutrients and water, especially from one part of the plant to another. Mosses came before that existed.