# Mini landscape rock



## RudeDogg1 (14 Oct 2020)

So I’ve just had a load of mini landscape rock arrive for my new tank. I realise this is prob a stupid question. I noticed some pieces have small amounts of natural moss on would it survive and grow in water?


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## RudeDogg1 (15 Oct 2020)

Lol I’ll take that as a no


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## Tim Harrison (15 Oct 2020)

Probably not...


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## zozo (15 Oct 2020)

Mosses ar a remarkable adaptable ancient plant species we actually still know very little about... They can be remarkably resistant as they can be remarkably sensitive to minute changes in their environment. A sudden small change can make them go dormant and looking dead and stay like that till it improves again in their favour to revive again. Or they simply might change morphologically and revive in a completely different grow form.

A few years ago I took home some moss I thought it was some kind of Star moss, from the local forest, far away from water growing on sandy soil. Did put it submerged in a tank, all went brown looking dead and ugly. I just left it like that for months. And all of a sudden it revived grew new shoots from its tips looking rather different.

There are quite some more mosses that can grow both ways on land as in your garden and in water and both forms look different but it's the same moss. One known aquatic moss in the trade is called stringy moss -  Leptodictyum Riparium.

Land form



 

Aquatic form




We only know a few, likely there are many more... Maybe all mosses if given the proper conditions can do this.
The question is what is this condiction? The other question is, what moss are we talking about? Determining this beyond the few we know can be extremely difficult and few people are able to do this accurately in 90% of the cases its guesswork.

Thus Rock & Roll, you never know!...


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## Tim Harrison (15 Oct 2020)

You're right Marcel, bryophytes are amazingly adaptive. I guess the answer would be to give it a go and see what happens


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## zozo (15 Oct 2020)

Tim Harrison said:


> You're right Marcel, bryophytes are amazingly adaptive. I guess the answer would be to give it a go and see what happens



Yes, Tim, they are indeed amazing, even on land they can change form if given another condition to grow. I experienced this playing with Wabi Kusa and taking moss from the garden. Took some bright green moss patch from a concrete patio block wall in the garden. Always see it grow in small patches maybe 1mm tall, I see it every day and it never grows any taller on calcareous concrete/stone surfaces. But when I did put it on damp peat soil it started to grow rather rapidly over 10mm tall within a few weeks looking completely different. Unfortunately, as 90% of the mosses I took from nature I was unable to determine its kind.


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## RudeDogg1 (15 Oct 2020)

Cheers guys


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