there's a cryptogram look at that you'd think it was a rock
you want me to do the david attenborough hello and welcome back to curiosity mine
and welcome back also to bush botany the series where we meet up with warwick schofield
to investigate some of the more unusual plants and organisms that you'll find in and around
the opal fields at lightning ridge new south wales australia in this episode we're going to
have a look at a curious group of organisms that you might not have even noticed before
so we've got the fruiting body here of a cryptogam group of plants it's a non-flowering plant it just
reproduces with spores and this is the fruiting body that emits spores look at that dust looking
stuff they're the spores coming out of it and it's a fungus and the fungus plant is
just like cotton wool and it's permanently living all in under this horrible dry gravel
you'd say horrible because why would a plant grow here well not an ordinary flowering
plant as we know them but a fungus that can just reproduce using spores it lives underground all
the time with the exception of this fruiting body opportunity and up it pops and there's the spores
blowing away in the wind ready to create more of the fungus mycelium which is the cotton wool
like structure that appears in the soil so look at that you wouldn't know that was a plant would you
there's some cryptograms here that are totally different species they are lichens
lichen is a symbiotic arrangement between an algae and a fungi there's one species here
and there's another species here which is growing up above the ground like in mid-air there's one
there just here these are mosses this is all moss and if i was to tip my water bottle onto that it
would be green within one minute two minutes this would come up bright green these are mosses you'd
think it's just dirt black clay or something that is a plant the spore bearing but all of this is
moss if we tip cold water on that right now it would be green when we come back in a very short
time next time it rains that'll be all green all this surface here beautiful mosses all of
these odd things are part of the cryptogam group which is a wide grouping of plants or plant-like
organisms that reproduce without using seeds the word cryptogam comes from the ancient greek
kryptos meaning hidden and gameo meaning marriage which is a kind of prudish way i guess of saying
that these organisms reproduce without using seeds cryptogams play an important role in the ecosystem
as they do a lot of work to bridge the gap between lifeless sand and rock and fertile nutritious soil
that encourages the growth of proper plants and trees right so up here you just have your natural
top soil which is a very thin layer it's made up mainly of organisms plants we might call them but
not flowering plants the environment at lightning ridge is semi-arid it's pretty close to being a
desert the soil at lightning ridge generally comes in three kinds there's the dry red sand
which you'll find directly around the iron stone ridges it's the iron that gives it the red color
there's superfine black soil which you'll find out on the flat plains that's the stuff that you'll
get your car bogged in if there's a millimeter of rain anywhere within the electorate and then
there's the pale pink or white opal bearing clay on the opal fields themselves in areas where the
claystone might be near the surface or maybe it's been disturbed by opal mining the black soil from
the plains is relatively fertile soil but the other two kinds the iron rich sand and the opal
clay are not very fertile at all so over a lot of the surface area of the opal fields and nearby
all of the soil nutrients are concentrated in a very thin layer on the surface
thanks largely to cryptogams they have adapted to live just in that top few millimetres in this dry
semi-arid climate and they reproduce with spores and with little high-fee little roots and things
that grow underground some of them might have a leaf that appears on the surface but no stem
and some of the plants in this group are things like algae fungi yeasts bacteria and
then we could bring into that viruses nematodes there are little microorganisms there are little
invertebrates and this whole lot is what makes up the living structure of a real soil soil is not
just sand or clay it's all these things living as an ecosystem and usually they'll be down 100 mil
200 ml into the soil but here soil is a bit of a rarity it's too dry too hot
there's not enough weathering to happen it's this very very thin layer that produces the organic
chemicals that lives on and recycles the organic chemicals as a whole ecosystem which is the soil
millimeters only from that some grasses ferns may grow still producing spores
not flowers then maybe some grasses which are flowering plants and smaller wild flowers little
daisies then shrubs and eventually trees so this is called the natural succession
where we start with bare rock and these cryptogams get to work get the organic cycle started and when
in this dry climate this very fragile situation if that thin layer is disturbed the inn gets the
wind in gets the rain storms washes everything away and we're back to the bare dirt bare rock
nothing will grow and right here we can see where the cryptogam layer has been disrupted with the
passage of a road and you can see the edge look it's only millimetres thick this material but have
a look once it washes away for this track that we're on we've lost the soil structure and look
at the ground it's bare it's bare because there's no organic activity and you must have that a good
example of the cryptogam layer and where it's been disrupted so these weird little organisms form an
important but very fragile part of the ecosystem and when things go bad for the cryptogams
things can also go bad for the rest of the environment now we've tried to focus this
series of videos on plants and organisms that are significant to lightning ridge to the local area
and to opal mining and also we've tried to focus on plants that have a relationship
with opal mining sometimes that relationship is a positive one like the use of renewable
cypress pine for props in underground opal mines we've looked at props in previous videos but
sometimes the relationship between the plants and the opal mining might not be so symbiotic
and that has been the case in the past when it comes to cryptogams opal miners were required to
rehabilitate their site always they pay a thousand dollar cash deposit and until their 50 meter by 50
meter square is rehabilitated they don't close it down or get their deposit refunded and years ago
the opel miner to make sure that it was perfectly left with no old batteries and material and mining
rubbish would bring in a road grader or a front end loader and scrape the surface absolutely bare
and they would say there mr environment inspector look at that perfectly rehabilitated and what
they done was remove the cryptogam layer all the yeast algae fungi bacteria living stuff and leave
it with a bare patch of sand so these days the miners are required to leave rocks and logs any
topsoil cryptogram material that's been moved they stockpile it and then spread it back over the site
and return the organisms back to where they were in the beginning but over time lessons have been
learnt and improvements to processes have helped to protect these vital and very strange little
organisms to ensure that the natural environment will remain healthy and relatively undisturbed for
the future it's good to look after the crypto games they're weird and they're important
before we finish this one up let's just talk a little bit about the difference between cryptic
gams and cryptograms because the words are really quite similar one of them is a group
of algae fungus and ferns that we've just looked at and the other is a kind of puzzle or code
where the letters get switched out for other letters in what's called a substitution cipher
generally you would figure out which letters represent which other letters and that way you
would solve the puzzle you might have seen puzzles like this in puzzle books or maybe
in the newspaper do they still do puzzles in newspapers do they still do newspapers hmm
where cryptogam is from the ancient greek kryptos hidden and gameo meaning to marry cryptogram is
also from kryptos meaning hidden and grammar meaning word so cryptogram means hidden
word but you have to admit it would be pretty easy to get the words cryptogram and cryptogam confused
right it's not like there's ever been an awkward instance of a major government confusing these
two things in the midst of you know one of the most significant covert operations of a world war
surely not well if you believe viral articles shared on social media there was supposedly and
that's supposedly with a very big asterisk during the second world war the british government code
and cipher school brought in a very confused specialist by the name of jeffrey tandy to
work at bletchley park on the enigma project to reverse engineer the german enigma machine the
enigma machine if you're not familiar with it was basically a lot like a typewriter but it used a
bunch of complex mechanisms to turn whatever you typed into it into a bunch of random letters that
would then be decoded by someone at the other end who had another enigma machine and knew the right
combination of switches and buttons to convert that message back into your original message again
now needless to say that working on the enigma project had a lot more to do with code breaking
and mathematics and deciphering and cryptograms than it did with jeffrey tandy's actual specialty
which was marine biology focusing on seaweed kelp plankton and cryptogams apparently someone had
either misread the word on tandy's paperwork all the paperwork had a typo in it that ended up with
him getting filed in the wrong category but either way he was hired and off to bletchley park he went
apparently and this is where the story gets really interesting while he was at bletchley park his
expertise did come in handy his knowledge and experience in preserving plant specimens helped
when he was able to help salvage the pages from a water-soaked code book that was brought up from a
sunken german u-boat and that document massively contributed to actually cracking the enigma code
which was a turning point in the outcome of world war ii now is the story true
i'd really like to think it is but there's a bit of a consensus that while the key facts are true
the narrative has been exaggerated tandy did work at bletchley park and he did work on enigma but
so did a lot of other people from a lot of very diverse backgrounds in science and mathematics
the code and cypher school deliberately took on faculty from all disciplines provided they showed
an aptitude for skills that were potentially relevant to any of the multitude of different
projects that were going on at any given time so hiring a marine biologist to work on code breaking
really isn't that crazy some online researchers have concluded that
maybe tandy or his peers have made up the cryptogames cryptograms sort of connection
as a bit of a joke i mean they were british that's kind of in line with the british sense
of humor and maybe it's just something that got stuck and has been stuck for decades but i think
the moral to the story is still very appropriate you should never underestimate a marine biologist
this video was made with the help of warwick schofield with assistance from margaret schofield
and kay wotherspoon if you enjoyed this video please consider sharing it with your friends
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the usual social media channels the links are in the description and thank you for watching