Blackwater Preserve Field Trip: Pines, Ants and Pixie Moss

Nearly 20 members of the ODU community, including alumni, faculty members and graduate students, participated in a field trip to the university's Blackwater Ecological Preserve near Zuni, Va., on Friday, March 21, led by visiting scholar Mark Moffett and ODU botanist Lytton Musselman (see photos below).

National Geographic magazine has dubbed Moffett the "Indiana Jones of entomology;" he has traveled the world photographing and studying ants. Moffett, a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution, had come to ODU on March 20 to deliver the annual Lytton J. Musselman Natural History Lecture. Encounters with ants and termites were part of the field trip experience, but Musselman, ODU's Mary Payne Hogan Professor of Botany, was along to assure that plants got their share of the attention.

As manager of the preserve, Musselman has championed the return of longleaf pines to the site after the species almost became extinct in eastern Virginia. The more than 300-acre preserve is part of the 1,000-acre Zuni Pine Barrens Natural Area.

Photos by Chuck Thomas

Musselman, with a longleaf pine seedling to his right, scans the canopy of a full-grown longleaf pine with Laurie Pitchford, a donor to the Musselman Natural History Lecture and also a member of the committee that organizes the event.

Controlled burning at the Blackwater Preserve has not only helped to re-establish longleaf pine trees, which can survive fires that clear out underbrush and smaller trees, but also promoted the return of pixie moss. One pixie moss flower is shown here.

An expansive flowering of pixie moss, one of the rarest plants in the state, greeted the field trip participants.

Mark Moffett, left, and Lytton Musselman led the excursion through the preserve.

Deborah Waller, ODU associate professor of biological sciences, collects ants and termites for study back on the campus.

Visiting scholar Mark Moffett (far right) and ODU botanist Lytton Musselman (center) are shown with field trip participants (from left) Barbara Henley, of the ODU Office of Development; Alden Cleanthes, a biology alumna; and John Schonk and Doug Davis, biology alumni.

ODU alumnus Carl Cleanthes ventures out on a tree that has fallen into swamp water at the Blackwater Preserve.