I grew up in rural Northern California, and in retrospect, I was always surrounded by bryophytes, although I didn’t take notice until much later in life. Priced out of the San Francisco housing market in 1974 (yes, it has been unaffordable for that long), my parents bought some land in the Coast Ranges about 60 miles north of the city and built our family home themselves. I spent my childhood playing in the creeks and woods around our house by myself, which I think instilled some of the habits of mind (observing details and patterns; composing narratives about my surroundings in my head) that eventually prepared me for doing science. My dad was a landscape architect, and so I developed an early awareness that the plants around me all had formal, difficult-to-remember names. A long-held myth in my family (that might actually be true) is that my mom narrowly saved me from being named Agapanthus africanus Johannes.
After completing my undergraduate studies in Biology at UC Santa Cruz, I didn’t really have a plan. I spent about a year working random jobs and eventually decided that I wanted to go back to graduate school to study plant phylogenetics (something I knew almost zero about at the time that I applied to schools). I managed to write a convincing enough statement of purpose that I was accepted into the Integrative Biology grad program at UC Berkeley. In my application, I indicated that I wanted to study the phylogenetics of a native Pacific coast geophyte group like Calochortus, but shortly after being accepted, I received a phone call from Brent Mishler asking if I’d be interested in studying a tropical moss family, Calymperaceae, instead. Some key words in his pitch like ‘tropical,’ ‘travel,’ and ‘full research assistant position’ resonated with me, and bam – my academic random walk landed me in bryology!
I’m so grateful that serendipity led me into studying mosses: aside from the hindsight that Calochortus phylogenetics would have been an absolute nightmare using the molecular tools available in the early 2000s, mosses have proven to be an amazing group for studying evolutionary biology in plants. For my dissertation, I worked on the Leucophanella clade in Calymperaceae under the generous support of Brent and his NSF PEET grant. The Calymperaceae is a magical group (one might say overkill for a novice bryologist), and I spent countless hours at a microscope in the Mishler lab admiring all its quirky and beautiful traits. Studying this group also allowed for the aforementioned travel to tropical places, and I was lucky enough to do fieldwork in French Polynesia and Madagascar during graduate school. After earning my PhD, I spent a few years as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center where I worked with publicly available genomic and transcriptomic data to investigate the evolution of gene families involved in desiccation tolerance. I started my current faculty position at Cal State LA in 2008, and took advantage of the proximity of the Mojave Desert to begin studying the genus Syntrichia, in particular, S. caninervis, a highly desiccation tolerant species that is prevalent in soil surface communities (biocrusts) in drylands worldwide. My lab has studied various aspects of S. caninervis ecology and population genetics, and I have had the very good fortune to work with a number of amazing graduate students during my time at Cal State LA (including Jenna Ekwealor, who has a bio in this collection!)
I am particularly grateful to mosses for helping me recognize my own biases as a human observer of my surroundings. Mosses challenge our commonly held concepts of things like individuality, time, and environment (at moss scales), and in generating predictions and hypotheses, I try to stay cognizant of how these factors may present themselves from a moss’s perspective. Appreciating the evolutionary trajectory of a generally neglected and misunderstood group has also inadvertently primed me for a lot of the work that I do in my current faculty position. As a bryologist, I have spent my professional life attempting to correct misconceptions about the evolutionary identity of bryophytes relative to tracheophytes, which has trained me to view most established ideas and dominant narratives through a critical lens. My university has a majority minoritized student population and a faculty that does not mirror the student population in its composition, so doing my job well requires a sensitivity to the ‘common sense’ assumptions and practices that often marginalize nondominant groups and perpetuate inequities. Being an advocate for bryophytes has prepared me well for this work. When I teach courses on biodiversity and evolution, I spend a good deal of time practicing (phylogenetic) tree-thinking with my students; however, I’m now considering strategies for training them in moss-thinking, which ultimately might be much more valuable.
Publications
Ekwealor, J.T.B. and K. Fisher. 2024. Reproduction and population dynamics in autonomous gametophytes. International Journal of Plant Sciences in press, https://doi.org/10.1086/729606
Mackelprang, R., Vaishampayan, P. and K. Fisher. 2022. Adaptation to environmental extremes structures functional traits in biological soil crust and hypolithic microbial communities. mSystems.
Ekwealor, J.T.B., Benjamin, S.D., Jomsky, J.Z., Bowker, M.A., Stark, L.R., McLetchie, D.N., Mishler, B.D. and K.M. Fisher. 2022. Genotypic confirmation of a biased phenotypic sex ratio in a dryland moss using restriction fragment length polymorphisms. Applications in Plant Sciences 10: p.e11467.
Antoninka, A., Chuckran, P.F., Mau, R.L., Slate, M.L., Mishler, B.D., Oliver, M.J., Coe, K.K., Stark, L.R., Fisher, K.M. and M.A. Bowker. 2022. Responses of Biocrust and Associated Soil Bacteria to Novel Climates Are Not Tightly Coupled. Frontiers in Microbiology 13: 821860.
Bowker, M., Rengifo-Faiffer, M.C., Antoninka, A., Grover, H., Coe, K., Fisher, K., Mishler, B., Oliver, M., and L. Stark. 2021. Community composition influences ecosystem resistance and production more than species richness or intraspecific diversity. Oikos 130: 1399-1410.
Silva, T.S., Gao, B., Fisher, K.M., Mishler, B.D., Ekwealor, J.T.B., Stark, L.R., Li, X., Zhang, D., Bowker, M.A., Brinda, J.C., Coe, K.K., and M. Oliver. 2021. To dry perchance to live: Insights from the genome of the desiccation-tolerant biocrust moss Syntrichia caninervis. The Plant Journal 105: 1339-1356.
Coe, K.K., Greenwood, J.L., Slate, M.L., Clark, T.A., Brinda, J.C., Fisher, K.M., Mishler, B.D., Bowker, M.A., Oliver, M.J., Ebrahimi, S., and L.R. Stark. 2021. Strategies of desiccation tolerance vary across life phases of the moss Syntrichia caninervis. American Journal of Botany 108: 249-262.
Ekwealor, J.T.B., and K. Fisher. 2020. Life under quartz: Hypolithic mosses in the Mojave Desert. PLOS ONE 15(7): e0235928.
Fisher, K., Jefferson, J.S., and P. Vaishampayan. 2020. Bacterial communities of Mojave Desert biological soil crusts are shaped by dominant photoautotrophs and the presence of hypolithic niches. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 7: 518.
Ekwealor, J.T.B., Payton, A.C., Paasch, A.E., Fisher, K., and S.F. McDaniel. 2017. Multiple factors influence population sex ratios in the Mojave Desert moss Syntrichia caninervis (Pottiaceae). American Journal of Botany 104:733-742.