nutrient Requirements
Most knowledge about nutrient requirements of
bryophytes comes from culturing them. We soon learned
that concentrations that favored the growth of
tracheophytes in the laboratory were too strong for the
poikilohydric bryophytes, and dilutions of 10:1 seemed
more satisfactory. Hoffman (1966) performed a complex
set of experiments on the moss Funaria hygrometrica in
which he determined anion (N:P:S) and cation (K:Ca:Mg)
combination effects. In his anion experiments, the absence
of any of the three nutrients caused poor protonemal
growth and no gametophores. On the other hand, the
protonemata responded quite differently to the various
cation combinations from the responses of the
gametophores. This suggests that our usual descriptions of
conditions based on leafy plants may not provide us with
any useful information on requirements needed for
establishment