Moss. It’s everywhere. In cracks, on rocks, under your feet. We dismiss it. Background noise.
But it isn’t simple. It’s old. Some of the earliest plants in the fossil record. Yet we treat it like a static carpet.
A new study published in Royal Society Open Science challenges this. Moss cushions produce complex electrical waves. These patterns undulate across the surface. They look startlingly like a neural network firing signals.
Andy Adamatzky is the lone author. He’s a computer scientist. His obsession lies with unconventional computing systems. Slime molds. Mycelium. Crowds. Now, he’s focused on Brachythecium rutabulum. The common moss.
“Plants and bryophytes display diverse form of electrical activity, yet the organization endogenous signals mosses received little attention,” Adamatzky notes.
His data suggests something wilder. Moss cushions act as spatially distributed excitable systems. They might coordinate signals across space and time. Not just sit there.
The Anatomy of a Moss Cushion
Look closer at a patch. Really close. It’s not one plant. It’s a colony of clones.
Tiny stems. Minute leaves. Resembling the larger plants they’re related to, but stripped down. Moss lacks vascular systems. That’s the key. No xylem. No phloem. The conduits other plants use to pump water and nutrients.
Because of this, they stay short. A few centimeters max. Their leaf structures are a single cell thick. No roots. Just anchors.
If they can’t transport fluids internally like we do, how do they function? They might use electrical signals to share information across the colony. A biological internet.
Adamatzky collected B. rutabulum from North Somerset, UK. He took them back to the lab. He inserted electrodes. He wanted to see what happened inside that soggy green matrix.
Moss lives in slow motion. To catch its signals, he had to match its pace. He recorded over several days.
Reading the Electrical Noise
The results? A rich repertoire.
He found fast oscillatory spikes. Slower rhythmic fluctuations. Very slow depolarization waves.
Then came the unexpected part. He saw high-amplitude action potentials. Spike trains that looked neuron-like.
Some waves were rapid. Others undulated slowly. They didn’t stay local. They spread. Across the whole cushion. Following patterns across different timescales.
This implies moss behaves as a dynamic interconnected system. Not independent cells. A single entity.
Is moss thinking? Hard to say. But it’s definitely processing something.
Limitations and Questions
The study has holes. Real ones.
There were no negative controls. No recordings on inert substrates to rule out instrument error. If the electrodes themselves are generating static, the data is noisy.
Then there’s the collection method. Field samples are chaotic. Contamination? Unknown hydration levels? These factors could skew the electrical flow.
More detailed research is needed. Adamatzky proposes moss could be a responsive sensory network or a distributed biocomputing substrate. But we can’t confirm that yet.
“This multi-layered organization supports the view that moss serves as a naturally evolved energy efficient living substrate for biohybrid sensing.”
Biohybrid sensing. Unconventional computation. Words that sound like sci-fi. But the moss doesn’t care about the labels.
It just survives. In the crevices. Under the soil. Sending its quiet electric pulses into the dark.
We’re only beginning to listen. And what we’re hearing changes everything we thought we knew about the green carpet beneath our noses.
The research was published in Royal Society Open Science.
