“They block the ice below them, form a pedestal of ice, and they roll off the pedestal,” explains Hotaling.
The study brings to light the mechanisms behind the movement of each individual moss ball. The trio published the study in Polar Biology in late April this year.
“It was serendipity to meet him,” Gilbert says. Hotaling, who works at Washington State University, brought new energy to the project, and for the next two years they collectively put their noses together. “We just needed to push this project across the finish line but we didn’t have the time and energy to do that ourselves,” Bartholomaus says. They still didn’t know why these moss balls in synchronized motion. But six years later, that data was still unpublished, lingering in the back of their minds. After a year of extensive research in 2009, followed by return trips to the glacier for the next three summers, during which they tracked the movements of 30 individual balls using color-coded bracelets, the couple discovered that the ‘glacier mice’ moved in a slow, herd-like motion, traveling around 2.5 centimeters each day. One day while hiking on Root Glacier, they came across a herd of soft, pillowy clumps of moss-these glacier moss balls, made of moss usually wrapped around dust or sediment, live in small herds on glaciers.
Gilbert and Bartholomaus, who have been married since 2012, first met at an undergraduate research program in the Wrangell Mountains of Alaska in 2006. Sophie Gilbert, a wildlife ecologist, and Tim Bartholomaus, a glaciologist and geophysicist, both professors at the University of Idaho, sat at the bar, surrounded by graduate students, postdocs, and professors. At a science-themed happy hour in a bar located in between the University of Idaho and Washington State University, glaciologist Scott Hotaling was talking about his research on ice worms.
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