FloraOfNewZealand-Mosses-43-Fife-2019-Ptychomniaceae
The Ptychomniaceae are a small family of mosses, largely restricted to temperate and cool regions of the southern hemisphere. Members of the family are conspicuous and attractive components of New Zealand forests and grasslands. Our most conspicuous and well-known species, Ptychomnion aciculare, occurs primarily on the forest floor; the so-called “pipe-cleaner moss” is one of the few indigenous moss species with a widely used English name. Most other members of the family occur as epiphytes. Pleurocarpous habit, often plicate leaves, strongly ribbed capsules, and long rostrate opercula are features that help to characterise the family. Members range in size from robust plants forming extensive forest floor carpets (as in Ptychomnion), to minute plants on twigs usually apparent only to the trained eye (as in Tetraphidopsis). As traditionally circumscribed (by Brotherus), the Ptychomniaceae include seven genera and about 15 species. In this treatment, eight N.Z. species in six genera are assigned to the family. Three of the N.Z. genera, Cladomnion, Dichelodontium, and Tetraphidopsis, are both monotypic and endemic. Ptychomnion is the most speciose genus in the family and contains between five and eight species, depending on taxonomic interpretation. The relationships (and generic assignments) of our two species of Hampeella remains unresolved, while the retention of Dichelodontium here is controversial, largely due to interpretation of its peristome structure. Recent studies using both molecular and morphological characters have potentially enlarged this traditional (Brotherean) view of the family. Two monotypic genera, one a segregate of Ptychomnion, have recently been described from temperate South America. A recent proposal to transfer large southern Asian and Malesian genera (Garovaglia and allies) to the Ptychomniaceae would make the family more morphologically heterogeneous and difficult to characterise but has little direct significance when considering the N.Z. representatives.
Additional Information
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Data last updated | 5 February 2019 |
| Metadata last updated | 28 November 2018 |
| Created | 28 November 2018 |
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