Moss might look quiet, but a new study says it is electrically busy.
Research published in Royal Society Open Science found cushions of the moss Brachythecium rutabulum produce complex electrical activity, with patterns moving across the patch in waves.
The study was written by sole author Andy Adamatzky, a computer scientist who has also studied unconventional computing systems including slime molds, crowds and mycelium networks.
“Plants and bryophytes display diverse forms of electrical activity, yet the organization of endogenous signals in mosses has received little attention,” Adamatzky writes in the paper.
He found that “moss cushions behave as spatially distributed excitable systems potentially capable of coordinating and integrating electrical signals across both space and time.”
For the study, Adamatzky collected cushions of B. rutabulum from natural outdoor environments in North Somerset in the UK.
In the lab, he inserted electrodes into the moss clumps to track electrical activity across the cushions, recording behavior across multiple days.
He reports “a rich repertoire of electrical events, including components consistent with both physiological activity and slower drift-related processes: fast oscillatory spikes, slower rhythmic fluctuations and very slow depolarization waves”.
“In addition to these described classes, we also observed spikes resembling high-amplitude action potentials and neuron-like spike trains.”
Some of the electrical waves were rapid and others moved slowly. They tended to spread across the whole cushion instead of staying in one region, and followed patterns across different timescales.
The findings suggest that “moss behaves as a dynamic, interconnected system rather than a collection of independent cells.”
The paper also points to limits in the work. It did not include negative control recordings on an inert substrate using the same electrode method, leaving open the possibility that some signals could have come from the instruments rather than the moss.
The use of moss collected from nature also leaves questions about contamination, different hydration levels or other factors that may have affected the electrical activity.
Adamatzky writes that moss could act as “responsive sensory networks or distributed biocomputing substrates”, but the article says much more detailed research is needed before that is known.
“This multi-layered organization supports the emerging view that moss can serve as a naturally evolved, energy-efficient living substrate for biohybrid sensing and unconventional computation.”
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