BioAether Team Sends Mosses and Fruit Flies into Stratosphere

Morgantown, WV, June 23, 2006:  Nature appeared to defy physics when four species of mosses survived a plunge from the Earth’s atmosphere and a collision with a passing train. The Department of Biology in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University supplied two engineering students with fruit flies and mosses to be launched into the Stratosphere and recovered after the fall.

Dr. Susan Studlar, adjunct associate professor of Biology, provided the various species of mosses, while Dr. Ashok Bidwai, associate professor of Biology, provided fruit flies. Christopher Eddy and James Spence, members of the BioAether Team and WVU Engineering students, designed and implemented a project that launched the living organisms into the Stratosphere.

The challenge was to launch, control conditions, retrieve and assess the condition of the box and its contents. To recover the small electronic payloads that had been sent into the atmosphere using helium-filled balloons, each project was equipped with a Global Positioning System (GPS) later used to track down where the project had landed.

The BioAether Team took a biological approach to the engineering project. The three species of peatmoss (Sphagnum) and Catherine’s moss (Atrichum angustatum) used for the experiment were obtained from Dr. Studlar’s Plant Diversity class. One set of samples was secured inside the designed box, along with the fruit flies. The second set of mosses was secured on the outside of the box to be exposed to the elements.

All of the students’ boxes fell from the stratosphere and were, unfortunately, struck by a passing train with the box from the BioAether team the most successfully retrieved. While the fruit flies did not survive, all of the mosses located inside the box did survive. After one month of culturing the mosses, Dr. Studlar found that all but one species of mosses had regenerated.

“Clearly the students were highly successful in their mission: to design a box that would keep four mosses alive in the stratosphere,” Dr. Studlar reflected. “The survival of some mosses, even outside the box, helped the students understand how mosses can achieve such vast distributions, potentially riding powerful updrafts during storms.”

Dr. Studlar found great pride in her bryological research. “The extraordinary resiliency of mosses, which grew readily from fragments and survived a balloon ride and a train wreck, contrasted sharply with the vulnerability of the fruit flies,” Dr. Studlar continued. “As a bryologist working on the flora of West Virginia, this study is directly relevant to my research and to my teaching. I want to understand, not only what moss species we have in West Virginia, but also, how they get around the world.”

In response to the findings, Dr. Studlar and Christopher Eddy are planning to send an article to Evansia, an educational periodical published by the American Bryological and Lichenological Society. Another article will be sent to the Bryological Times, a web-based newsletter of the International Association of Bryologists.

The Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering course is taught by Dr. Mike Palmer and Dr. John Kuhlman, and funded by the NASA WV Space Consortium.

For more information, contact Dr. Susan Studlar at sstudlar@wvu.edu.

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