The Moss Bosses

Posted on January 3, 2016January 3, 2017 by Liz Darling (Sears)

By Liz Darling (Sears) and Jesse Sills

Hi everyone! Now that the vascular plants of Canada DNA barcoding project is all finished (Read about it here), the team here at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics has moved on to another group of plants: the Bryophytes. This term broadly encompasses all land plants that do not have any true vascular tissue, which includes the mosses, liverworts and hornworts.

No rolling stones, we can’t seem to stop gathering moss! Liz and Jesse pose with the boxes of specimens

For the first two weeks of February, Jesse Sills, Masha Kuzmina and Liz Darling (Sears) headed off to the capital of Canada to collect mosses from the Canadian Museum of Nature. We were working out of their herbarium, which is located in the secondary collections building, rather than the main building that is accessible to the public (and contains many amazing exhibits!). When creating a reference database, it is incredibly useful to have access to well-curated collections such as this one in order to allow us to take samples from species that have been examined and identified by multiple experts. The idea is basically to collect roughly three specimens of each species available, preferably as widely spread across Canada as possible. This allows us to curate a database of DNA from not only as many species as possible, but also try to investigate whether a species experiences genetic drift when separated by thousands of kilometers. By collecting and barcoding these known species, we can then form a basis to identify unknown species by comparing to the reference database.

There is a plethora of striking similarities between sampling vascular plants and mosses, but several differences actually make sampling the bryophytes significantly more difficult. Firstly, instead of being mounted on herbarium sheets like vascular plants, mosses are stored in envelopes.

The envelopes of mosses are stored upright in boxes within the herbarium cabinets

Although this doesn’t sound like a big difference, having to open and close each envelope to be able to look at the specimens drastically slows down the process. Secondly, mosses are generally a lot smaller than vascular plants, making sampling under a microscope necessary.

Masha peers through the microscope, carefully choosing the material to sample

Jesse sampling at the second microscope station

Thirdly, mosses have a most inconvenient habit of growing in groups with many other species, often closely related to them. This can make it quite difficult to determine which species in the moss clump is the one you are trying to collect. Microscopes and identification books quickly became our best friends when it came to sampling these tiny plants. The museum envelopes can vary from containing a large rock with a small speck of moss on it, to a handful of dirt with some small pieces of moss to a huge piece of moss containing up to 7 different species.

An example of a messy sample, this envelope was mostly gravel and dirt (CCDB-28007-C02)

Some of the specimens were in absolutely beautiful condition (CCDB-28051-B09)

An example of a specimen with multiple species present. Each arrow points to another species – the red one even points to a mollusk! (CCDB-28095-B02) — An example of a specimen with multiple species present. Each arrow points to another species – the red one even points to a mollusc! (CCDB-28095-B02)

We also took images of each specimen using scanners and a camera. Impressively, over the span of 8 days we managed to sample all of the green mosses in the collection – a total of 1805 specimens! This brings the total for the project up to 1981 specimens representing 792 different species of moss.

Setting up the specimens to be imaged involves laying them out on white cardstock with all possible identification sheets easily legible

Liz taking high resolution scans of the specimens

As a relatively poorly studied group of plants, it is not really known how many species of moss there are in Canada, with estimates ranging from 1100 – 2400 species. Wherever the true number lies, it is definitely much higher than we have currently collected, which means we still have a lot of work to do! It just might be that our work helps to uncover some of the mysteries of this microscopic world!

-Liz & Jesse

Beetles, Bees, and… Beef?

Posted on November 27, 2015January 3, 2017 by Allison Brown

Back in October, BIO sent out teams to three different museums to collect specimens. Both Connor and Angela have already outlined the details of their trips, so now it’s my turn! Valerie Levesque-Beaudin and I drove up to Montreal (Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue specifically) to visit the Lyman Entomological Museum and Research Laboratory on the Macdonald Campus of McGill University.

The Lyman Entomological Museum collection houses 2.8 million specimens of insects and other arthropods, making it the second largest insect collection in Canada, and the largest university insect collection in the country. Our goal at Lyman was to collect as many Coleoptera and Hymenoptera species as we could, to further add to our DNA Barcode Library on BOLD. As we have previously sent teams to the Lyman collection twice before, we were also returning all of the specimens that we pulled from last year’s trip (over 4,000 specimens!). The director of the museum, Dr. Terry Wheeler, has always been very helpful with our efforts to barcode their museum specimens. One benefit to a partnership with museum collections is that not only do we get to add the species DNA to our library, but every specimen that we borrow from a museum also gets imaged and databased; the museum gets access to all of this information that may otherwise not have been available online and can then be easily accessed/analyzed. (P.S. check out the Lyman Entomological Museum’s blog! https://lymanmuseum.wordpress.com/)

All of these cabinets (and many more!) are filled with so many cool insects! Check out Val searching for some elusive beetle species that we don’t yet have on BOLD.

An assortment of some of the really cool and interesting beetles that are housed at the Lyman Collection. If you couldn’t tell, weevils and longhorns are some of my favourites!

I stumbled across these little guys while searching for other Hymenoptera in the Lyman Collection. They’re so fluffy, I’m gonna die!

Val and I also had a chance to drive up to Quebec City to visit Jan Klimaszewski at the Laurentian Forestry Centre. Jan is an expert of the family Staphylinidae (Rove Beetles), so we were able to focus solely on borrowing that one family of beetles. We are hoping that in turn, the DNA barcoding will help to understand the relationship between species in this megadiverse group of beetles.

A colleague of Jan Klimaszewski’s, George Pelletier, works like a busy bee to help add specimens to our boxes!

Now I know you might be thinking, where’s the beef? Well one of the benefits of visiting insect collections in Montreal is the food! Val and I were very lucky indeed to use our weekend to do some culinary exploration in the city. We went to Dunn’s for smoked meat and La Banquise for poutine. So yummy! We also had a chance to settle another beef…we went to a Habs vs. Leafs game! Val is a Montreal Canadiens fan and I am a Toronto Maple Leafs fan. I got heckled a lot and we lost, which is to be expected, but we still had a lot of fun!