Neighbourly Dispute at the Edge of Life: Species Interactions Among Antarctic Mosses

Prepared by Seringe N. Huisman, Rong Liu, J. Hans C. Cornelissen, Peter Convey, and Stef Bokhorst

Antarctica is one of the harshest environments for plant growth on earth, with cold, dry, and windy conditions. Mainly mosses and lichens are able to survive there, mostly along the slightly milder Antarctic Peninsula. It is often thought that in such harsh environments, there is no competition between species because they simply need all their energy to survive. However, along the Antarctic Peninsula, we observed mosses seemingly competing for space between rocks. To test if mosses can compete even under such harsh conditions, we collected pairs of species and grew them together in a climate chamber. After one simulated growing season, Sanionia uncinata, the most dominant species in the field, grew better in combination with other species than alone, while all other species decreased compared to growing alone. This shows that interactions could in fact play a role and that some species might always ‘win’ over others, which influences the species composition. It is therefore important to take species interactions, alongside the environmental conditions, into account when trying to understand the composition of these unique Antarctic moss communities.

This is a plain language summary of the paper of Huisman et al. published in the Journal of Vegetation Science (https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.70123)