British Science Week 2023: Why do a Moss Safari?

It’s British Science Week 2023 (10-19th March) which has the theme of ‘connections’.

Moss Safari is a fantastic activity to do with your classes or clubs for children of all ages. Once you have access to microscopes, the rest is easy, just some wet moss, a microscope slide and an inquiring mind can set up for an hour or even a hours of discovery.

To help you set this up and then identify what you see, Moss Safari provides a range of free resources for primary and secondary school teachers to use with their classes.

As interest continues to grow in Moss Safari, I have put together a series of posts that will be released during the British Science Week period that will focus on the Big Five multicellular organisms and other aspects of Moss Safari to inspire interest and confidence in educators and anyone else to do their own Moss Safaris.

How does Moss Safari link with the theme ‘connections’? Here I offer three opportunities that I see that Moss Safari offers.

Connections with the history of science

Imagine being the first person to look down a microscope at a drop of pond water. Asking students to observe their first Moss Squeeze droplets with the mind of being the first to see these organisms can be inspiring. In fact, I often tell Moss Safari adventurers to appreciate that we will be first humans to see these very organisms. One of my earliest blogs explored this idea: Your first Moss Safari. When I started doing Moss Safari as a hobby I used to name the organisms I saw without worrying what they were classified as – I used names like ‘retracting whisks’, ‘hairy racers’ and ’emerald batons.’ I still have files of photos with those names. It’s a good low pressure approach to observing a Moss Squeeze for the first time.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632 – 1723) was the first to describe the organisms that live in water amongst many other microscopic discoveries. He is often called the ‘father of microbiology’. He produced fascinating drawings of the organisms he saw and changed the way we understand the natural world. What other scientific discoveries can make a similar claim to this?
One of our Big Five multicellular organisms was first described 250 years ago this year – the tardigrade (water bear or slow walker) was drawn and officially described by German pastor J.A.E. Goeze in 1773. Find out more about the 250th anniversary celebrations here. What does it mean to ‘scientifically describe’ an organism? What is this process? Does it still happen?

Connections with nature

After their first Moss Safari, people often say that they will never look at moss in the same way again. Often they will start to notice moss when they hadn’t before. This shows that the Moss Safari experience can connect people with nature long after the event itself. I blogged about my own experience here.
Take people outside and get them to look for moss. Look on top of walls, in crevices between pavements, on tree bark or branches, in grass. I see moss everywhere – along the pavements in central London, on a wall in a taxi park in Miami, to the local park where I walk my dogs. Most school grounds will have moss somewhere. Get students out there, get a hand lens, look closely.
Moss is a micro-habitat and I would argue an extreme environment. Both these feature in the Science National Curriculum in England and no doubt most other curricula globally. The Big Five organisms are all connected by having different (or similar) adaptations for the same environmental stresses (extreme high and low temperatures and extreme availability of water, from none to being completely submerged). Within the moss habitat they are interdependent on one another and a host of other organisms. The blogs I publish over Science Week will reveal these connections. Life in microscopic world of moss illustrates the trials of life faced by their macroscopic counterparts all over the planet: survival, feeding, reproducing, moving, natural selection, symbiosis and the list goes on.

Connections with becoming a scientist

An important feature of Moss Safari is that it can demonstrate to students that science isn’t done. National Curriculum science can often leave students feeling that there is nothing left to discover in science and this couldn’t be further from the truth. One of my aims in Moss Safari is to inspire students to become scientists as I hope I achieved in a visit to a secondary school where some students were inspired by the idea of doing a PhD in a single microorganism.
Only recently have scientists found that rotifers (one of Moss Safari’s Big Five) can survive, frozen for at least 24,000 years, wake up and reproduce.
All the Big Five have species all over the planet, with new species being described each year. For example, of the thousands of Oribatid mites (the order that Moss Mites belong to) described, it is estimated that there are hundreds of thousands of species still to be found. Soil dwelling mites are essential in nutrient cycling in soil and of research interest in agriculture. New species of tardigrades are being found at a rate of about ten a year. The diatoms often seen in moss are still being studied to understand how exactly they glide over surfaces and a recent PhD was published on the ecology of diatoms that live on the skin of a manatee! The science is far from done.

Getting involved with Science Week

Follow Moss Safari on Twitter (@mosssafari), Facebook or Instagram.

I will be posting information, photos and blogs throughout Science Week.

I will revive #mosssafariid on Twitter. If you are doing your own Moss Safari and you want to share your finds or ask for an identification, use the hashtag and I will reply as quickly as I can.

Want to see a live Moss Safari online?

Coming soon… next month I am doing a live online Moss Safari for the whole family.

Intrigued what Moss Safari is all about? I am hosting a live online Moss Safari on Wed 19 April 2023, 16:30 – 18:00 BST

It’s free for Association for Science Education members at and just £7:50 for non-members – proceeds go to the work of the ASE. Sign up… Let the family join… I guarantee that you will never see moss the same way again.