When nature calls, and kingdom Plantae is whipped into a reproductive fervor, peat moss doesn't merely release its spores -- it explodes them. For the first time ever, researchers using ultra high speed video have recorded in exquisite detail the volatile burst of spore capsules in several species of Sphagnum moss, and they've noted quirks of fluid dynamics, called "vortex rings," previously associated only with animals or machines. (For example, when squid and jellyfish propel themselves through water or helicopters chopper through the air, similar spiraling donuts of fluid result.) The mosses use the special dispersal technique to launch their genes high enough -- more than 10 cm above the carpet of low-lying plants -- to ride air currents and float aloft so they can be disseminated far and wide.

"If you want to know anything about the persistence of a species, you need to know how it reproduces and gets to new areas," Joan Edwards, botanist and author on a Science paper in this week's issue that announces the discovery, told The Scientist. With peat bogs covering 1 percent of Earth's surface and functioning as an important carbon sink on a warming globe, understanding their reproductive strategies becomes even more important. "This gives us some confidence that Sphagnum can disperse to new areas using this sophisticated technique to get from one place to another," added Edwards, who's based at Williams College in Massachusetts.

"What's been understudied in my opinion is how plants interact with their environment in the physical sense," Dwight Whitaker, Pomona College physicist and coauthor, told The Scientist. "With these high speed videos we were actually able to see the details of the mechanics to see a little tiny mushroom cloud coming out of these things."

Watch these videos, shot at up to 10,000 frames per second, to see what a blast Sphagnum spore release really can be.

A Sphagnum palustre spore capsule blows its top. Note the vortex ring that forms at the head of the spray of spores.
Video courtesy of Clara Hard, Joan Edwards, and Dwight Whitaker

Sphagnum magellanicum achieves "spore launch." The gene carrying particles reach a height of 143 mm.
Video courtesy of Nora Mitchell and Joan Edwards

Whitaker, DL and J. Edwards, "Sphagnum Moss Disperses Spores with Vortex Rings," Science, 329:406, 2010.


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