My god they grow so fast

 

My Sphaerocarpos culture currently consists of two (#2 is not shown) specimens! They were less than a cm long when I fragmented them off the wild plant but now they are both reaching adult size!

No wonder they're ephemerals in the wild.

In which I (among other things) suddenly begin to enjoy seafood

 Hiiiiii! Long time no talk! Though admittedly almost nothing has happened in the past months, so it's not like I had anything to say.

First: Sphaerocarpos! As I mentioned in my last post, I have found a wild colony. After numerous mishaps involving desiccation (one particularly amusing incident involved the sample pictured above somehow drying out and dying while in a sealed cup) I have finally established a culture. More on them later.

I also keep neglecting to mention this moss, which has not visibly grown at all since I found it last June. It appears to be a hydrophilous specialist as I have never seen it away from leaking water and seem to have only seen it twice ever (perhaps it is Didymodon tophaceus).

Unfortunately, a few days ago its top rapidly died. I assume that being suddenly moved to bright indirect light harmed it (yeah, mosses have been known to be sunburned by even weak light). In the wild it was in a place with direct sun but I had been keeping it shaded for a long time, so perhaps it had desynthesized its anti-sunburn defenses in the shade and could not resynthesize them rapidly enough.

You may note the green thing to its left. That is a gametophyte (fern it seems) of unknown origin. It probably arrived in my garden soil bag as an unintentionally imported spore, because the USDA is terrible at its job. Hopefully it will produce a sporophyte one day. Although given that there is only one of it in the cup I'm not optimistic.

I also went on a rather exciting shopping trip yesterday! I found several large marine algae as bycatch in the snail tank. Unfortunately pretty much all the snails were quite dead (in addition to being unethical, I'm also pretty sure it violates several food sanitation laws). Here you can see a bleached coralline alga and some sort of buoy-possessing seaweed. If I get a marine tank and learn how to disinfect live algae I'm going to fill it with rescued bycatch from the seafood tanks.

Also a number of the store fruits were heavily infested with scale insects. Did I mention the USDA was terrible at its job?

Anyways, I also brought home an unidentifiable gametophyte! It was growing as a weed in one of the store flowerpots so I took it home for free. It was neither of the two thalloid marchantiophytes that are supposed to be greenhouse pests (Lunularia cruciata, Marchantia polymorpha), so I suspect it may be an undiscovered invasive. Hopefully I can culture it to a size where it's less unIDable.