Recently, I found myself staring at the most common visuals of Belgium, which are these fantastic moss colonies on concrete walls. Intrigued, I began zooming in with my camera and discovered all kinds of shapes and color formations, sometimes with loops and crevices that otherwise the rest of macroscopic Belgium does not easily show.
As I read later, mosses are actually plants that grow on these building surfaces and need very little soil to thrive. They can even remain dormant for months until enough moisture revives them, and unless you use a legally permissible limit of acid to burn them off, moss colonies can spread over a large area and often coexist with other organisms like lichen. Lichen are quite an interesting phenomenon, basically being a partnership between a fungus and an alga that absorb pollutants from the air. This is especially useful because researchers have managed to use it as an air quality indicator in cities!
These funky blobs of moss do not root very deep, but they can lead to high water retention on concrete, which can be safe to say, rather bothersome. On the other hand, just a tiny zoom into life at that scale is like a whole wonderland of things hiding in plain sight.
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