He works bone and bark the way others work the wood of a violin: with the memory of gestures passed down through generations, more than through mere technical skill. José German Gonzalez Calderon, fishing captain, former president of the Yagan community of Chile and honorary member of our association, is exceptionally opening for sale a series of pieces crafted by his own hands: whalebone harpoons and sewn coihue-bark canoes, made using the ancestral navigation and hunting techniques of the Yagan people of the Fuegian channels.
Karukinka is pleased to present this preview sale, open to members of the association, to enthusiasts of southern cultures, and to museums wishing to acquire collection pieces.
José German Gonzalez Calderon, keeper of a recognized craft
Portrait of José German Gonzalez Calderon, Yagan artisan, with his creations: three whalebone harpoons (photograph by Omar Barroso)
José belongs to the last generation of Yagan navigators who grew up living a nomadic life, in direct contact with the traditional techniques of boatbuilding and maritime hunting practiced in the channels of Cape Horn. He is the godfather of the sailing vessel Milagro, the association's expedition platform in the channels of Patagonia and as far as Cape Horn, and the living link between Karukinka's scientific programme and the embodied knowledge of his people.
Cutting coihue bark......and assembling it aboard Milagro!Yagan whalebone harpoons crafted by José German Gonzalez Calderon
His craftsmanship — the sewn assembly of coihue-bark panels for canoe construction, and the shaping of whalebone for hunting harpoons — is recognized by UNESCO as part of efforts to safeguard the intangible cultural heritage of southern Indigenous peoples. This recognition attests to the heritage value of gestures that very few people are still able to reproduce today.
Canoes of varying sizes, accompanied by their emblematic pieces
Each canoe offered for sale is unique: José crafts them in different sizes, depending on requests and the time required for their making. No two pieces are identical, which gives each canoe the status of a collector's item in its own right.
Each canoe comes with a set of miniaturized emblematic pieces, faithfully reproducing the everyday tools and objects of Yagan maritime life:
A man's paddle and a woman's paddle, with distinct shapes according to traditional use.
A miniature harpoon with a whalebone tip, a faithful reproduction of the hunting harpoons.
A sea-urchin claw, a traditional tool for marine gathering.
A woven rush basket, used for collecting and transporting resources.
Bark canoe with miniature emblematic pieces made by José
This complete set makes it possible to grasp, through a single piece, the diversity of Yagan navigation and subsistence knowledge and daily practices.
Pieces exhibited at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago
Among José's creations are harpoons and one exceptional piece: a canoe about sixty centimetres long, exhibited at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago last April, and which has accompanied Milagro's crew since the end of May between Puerto Williams and France.
The canoe's return aboard the sailing vessel Milagro after its exhibition in Santiago. Lauriane Lemasson and José German Gonzalez Calderon (c) Damien Treutenaere
The museum's team agreed to lend this piece to the association so that it could be shared with as many people as possible over several months, including during the presentation of the association's work on Indigenous toponymy last June in Montpellier (International Conference on Inclusive Toponymy, co-organized by the UNESCO Chair in Toponymy).
This collaboration illustrates the institutional recognition enjoyed by José's creations, whose pieces naturally find their place in museum collections devoted to pre-Columbian and southern cultures.
José's Yagan canoe, exhibited at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago (April 2026)
The pieces on offer
Whalebone hunting harpoons.
Sewn coihue-bark canoes (varying sizes), each accompanied by their miniaturized emblematic pieces (man's paddle, woman's paddle, miniature harpoon, sea-urchin claw, woven rush basket).
José's harpoons exhibited in Santiago, alongside woven rush basketry pieces made by his niece Claudia
A preview sale entirely to the benefit of the artisan
Karukinka transfers the entirety of the proceeds from this sale to José, with no deduction whatsoever for the association. This preview sale thus aims to directly support the transmission of his craft and the economic recognition of a unique piece of intangible cultural heritage.
Who this preview sale is intended for
The preview sale is open to:
Members of the Karukinka association, as a priority, in keeping with their closeness to the project and to José.
Enthusiasts of southern cultures and traditional navigation wishing to acquire an authentic handcrafted piece.
Museums and cultural institutions wishing to add to their collections a piece representative of Yagan maritime knowledge.
For any information request or reservation, interested parties may contact the association at contact@karukinka.eu or by phone at +33 6 72 83 03 94 (a first contact via WhatsApp is preferred until September 5) or at +33 2 40 56 31 95.
The yellow powder that Puerto Williams residents have always seen on the trunks of lenga beech (Nothofagus pumilio) had never received a scientific name: Candelariella magellanica. In January–February 2005, and again in January 2008, an international team of lichenologists conducted the first intensive floristic survey of the lichen flora of Navarino Island in the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve. The result: 416 taxa recorded — and two species proposed as new to science.
Editorial note: This article draws directly on the open-access PDF of the reference publication: Etayo et al. (2021), Catalogue of lichens (and some related fungi) of Navarino Island, Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve, Chile, Anales del Instituto de la Patagonia, 49. DOI: 10.22352/AIP202149013. The article is freely available on the Cape Horn International Center website.
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The first intensive inventory of Navarino
For decades, Navarino was the poor relation of subantarctic lichenology. The Swedish botanist Rolf Santesson had made the first collection in 1940 along the northern coasts of Hoste and Navarino islands, but his specimens were never published during his lifetime. In 1977, Redón and Quilhot listed 56 species for the island. By 2008, Etayo and Sancho had raised this count to 113 through work on lichenicolous fungi. The 2021 catalogue multiplied that total in a single publication to 416 taxa, thanks to two field campaigns during the southern summers of 2005 and 2008, covering 46 sites across all major habitat types on the northern and northwestern part of the island — evergreen forests, deciduous forests, Magellanic moorlands, high-Andean habitats, coasts, and lakes.
This richness places Navarino Island (2,514 km²) above the Falkland Islands (more than 12,000 km²) in terms of recorded lichen taxa: the Falklands, lacking native trees and subject to a more extreme climate, count only around 353 species. The reason is structural: the southern beech (Nothofagus) forests of Navarino offer a diversity of substrates — bark, dead wood, stumps, mosses, rocks, soils — and constant humidity that enables an exceptionally dense epiphytic community to establish: a single trunk can host more than a hundred species of lichens and bryophytes.
The seven lichen habitats of Navarino
The study described seven major habitat types supporting lichen communities on Navarino Island:
This vertical and lateral gradient makes Navarino Island a particularly suitable space for studying the adaptation of lichens to subantarctic constraints: permanent winds, frequent freeze-thaw cycles, and precipitation ranging from 500 to over 1,000 mm depending on slope aspect.
Candelariella magellanica: description of the new species
Candelariella magellanica Etayo sp. nov. is a sulphur-yellow corticicolous lichen producing powdery propagules known as soredia, rather than conventional fruiting bodies. It colonises the bark of old Nothofagus pumilio in the deciduous forests of Navarino, at altitudes ranging from 86 to 560 metres. The formal description distinguishes it from the closest related species, Candelariella xanthostigmoides, by larger-diameter apothecia and spores frequently divided into two cells.
To the naked eye, C. magellanica appears as a thin layer of yellow powder on bark — virtually invisible without a hand lens. Yet it is present on numerous trunks in N. pumilio forests across the island, as observations along the Cerro Bandera, Cerro Ukika, and Lago Róbalo trails confirmed. It is precisely this visual inconspicuousness that explains why this locally frequent species remained unknown to science until 2021.
Sclerococcum nothofagi: an undescribed saprobic fungus
The second new species described in the catalogue is a saprobic fungus — not a lichen but a fungus associated with lichens — named Sclerococcum nothofagi Etayo sp. nov. It grows on the thick, aged bark of Nothofagus pumilio, alongside corticicolous lichen species. Its muriform spores (forming a network of cells) distinguish it from all known species in the genus. Its name directly references its exclusive substrate: the bark of southern beeches of the genus Nothofagus.
Alongside these two new species, Tremella haematommatis Diederich was recorded for the first time in South America, parasitising Haematomma nothofagi — itself a lichen endemic to Nothofagus forests.
The 2021 catalogue demonstrated that the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve is not only a global hotspot of bryophyte diversity — already established by the Omora Park team's earlier work — but also a first-order lichen hotspot for the Southern Hemisphere. The authors note that only the northern and northwestern half of the island was covered during both campaigns; the southern section, logistically difficult to access, remains to be surveyed and likely holds further discoveries.
The ecotourism with a hand lens developed at Omora Park now guides visitors towards these barely visible yellow coatings on lenga trunks, revealing to them that they are looking at a species known nowhere else on Earth — an invitation to shift perceptual scale in one of the remotest places on the planet.
Bibliography
Etayo J., Sancho L.G., Gómez-Bolea A., Søchting U., Aguirre F. & Rozzi R. (2021). Catalogue of lichens (and some related fungi) of Navarino Island, Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve, Chile. Anales del Instituto de la Patagonia, 49. https://doi.org/10.22352/AIP202149013
Etayo J. & Sancho L.G. (2008). Lichenicolous fungi from the Southern Hemisphere. II. Some new species and records from South Shetland Islands, South Georgia Island and Tierra del Fuego. Nova Hedwigia, 86 : 135–172.
Goffinet B., Rozzi R., Massardo F., Buck W. & Leiva M. (2012). Miniature Forests of Cape Horn: Ecotourism with a Hand Lens. University of North Texas Press.
Redón J. & Quilhot W. (1977). Líquenes del archipiélago del Cabo de Hornos. Boletín del Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de Chile, 35 : 53–71.
Rozzi R. et al. (2008). Changing lenses to assess biodiversity: patterns of species richness in sub-Antarctic plants and implications for global conservation. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 6(3) : 131–137.
In 2023, Chile officially incorporated the Selk'nam people into Indigenous Law 19.253, nearly a century after the waves of mass violence that swept across Tierra del Fuego. Behind this legal reform lies a long process of memory work, advocacy, and cultural self-affirmation led by Selk'nam families themselves.
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A people long absent from indigenous law in Chile
Since 1993, Law 19.253 has recognised a list of "indigenous peoples or ethnicities" in Chile and established CONADI, the National Corporation for Indigenous Development. For thirty years, this list included the Mapuche, Aymara, Rapa Nui, Atacameño, Quechua, Colla, Diaguita, northern Chango people, Kawésqar and Yagán — but not the Selk'nam.
Yet the memory of Chilean Tierra del Fuego remains deeply shaped by the Selk'nam presence: a people of nomadic hunters whose world stretched across steppe, forests and shores. In the accounts of explorers, missionaries and travellers such as Darwin, this people appears on the margins, already caught up in forced displacement or extermination. In law, they vanished entirely: Chile built an indigenous policy without ever mentioning the descendants of this people of the Great Island.
From parliamentary motion to law 21.606
The path to recognition runs through a bill, registered as Boletín 12.862-17 in the Chamber of Deputies. Carried by a cross-party group of parliamentarians, it proposed a targeted amendment: the explicit inclusion of the Selk'nam people in Article 1 of Law 19.253. The process involved years of patient work in committees, hearings and technical redrafting.
In August 2023, the Senate debated the bill. Senators and senators emphasised the historical debt owed by the State — its responsibility for declaring this people "extinct" while their descendants were living in Tierra del Fuego, in Porvenir and across other cities in the country. They approved a version introducing the Selk'nam into Article 1 and updating the law's terminology by speaking of "peoples" rather than merely "ethnicities".
On 4 September 2023, the Chamber of Deputies adopted the bill at third reading. According to the official record, 117 deputies voted in favour, with a single abstention, and the text was definitively approved. The Selk'nam became the eleventh indigenous people recognised under the Indigenous Law and the third people officially recognised in the Magallanes Region, alongside the Kawésqar and the Yagán.
A recognition described as a "historical debt"
Once passed, the law was promulgated and published in the Official Gazette on 19 October 2023, as Law 21.606. The new wording of Article 1 now lists, after the other peoples, the Selk'nam among "the main indigenous peoples or ethnicities of Chile". In the text, the State affirms that it values the existence of these peoples as "an essential part of the roots of the Chilean Nation, as well as their integrity and development, in accordance with their customs and values".
From the government's side, the Ministry of Social Development presented this reform as a form of reparation. Minister Javiera Toro spoke before Congress of a "historical debt" owed to the Selknam, recalling the State's responsibility in the policies that denied this people's existence and rendered their descendants invisible. On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Law 19.253, CONADI chose to highlight this recognition as a "doubly historic" moment: the anniversary of the Indigenous Law, and the entry of the Selk'nam into the list of recognised peoples.
This institutional gesture is built on years of work by Selk'nam families. In Porvenir, the Covadonga Ona indigenous community — made up of Selk'nam descendants in Chilean territory — established the Corporación del Pueblo Selk'nam en Chile to represent the people on legal and political matters. Its mandate: defend collective rights, support legislative processes, and carry the voice of the families into spaces of negotiation with the State.
As early as 2019, the corporation submitted a bill specifically seeking to include the Selk'nam in Indigenous Law 19.253, with the support of indigenous legal scholars such as Ariel León Bacián. In parallel, other collectives — including the Telkacher community and the Fundación Hach Saye — were conducting fieldwork: language workshops, family research, and the reclaiming of narratives about the genocide and forced displacements.
A recent study, carried out in collaboration with the Fundación Hach Saye and the University of Chile, shows how these families mobilise law, art and ethnography to generate "new forms of struggle". Legal recognition becomes a lever for questioning access to ancestral territories, the restitution of indigenous place names in Tierra del Fuego, and the way Selk'nam history is taught in schools.
Selk'nam voices: between joy, caution and memory
In indigenous and allied media, the 2023 recognition is often described as "historic", but never as an endpoint. Servindi sums up the significance of the law by recalling that the Selk'nam become the eleventh indigenous people officially recognised by the Chilean State, after decades of official denial. This new visibility exists in dialogue with a history of violence: bounty hunts, forced displacements, confinement in missions and estancias, which marked the Great Island of Tierra del Fuego and the surrounding archipelago.
In an interview broadcast by El Mostrador and republished by Karukinka, young Selk'nam man Mauricio Astroza (Asamblea Telkacher) stresses the symbolic weight of this moment. For him, the legal recognition opens doors, but the challenge now is to defend a living culture, prevent the appropriation of Selk'nam symbols by institutions that do not work with the families themselves, and correct the notion — still present in some school textbooks — that the people has "disappeared".
At an official ceremony, the president of the Selk'nam Telkacher community, Ana María Muñoz, spoke of "mixed feelings": the joy of being recognised by the State and by Chile's other indigenous peoples, alongside the memory of generations who kept customs, stories and place names alive in a context of invisibilisation. The law has changed, but the work of reparation remains to be built, step by step, on the ground.
After recognition: what horizons?
Law 21.606 does more than add a name to a list. By updating the terminology of Law 19.253 towards "indigenous peoples", it brings Chilean law closer to the language of international instruments such as ILO Convention 169 and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This vocabulary opens the door to a more collective understanding of rights: political participation, territorial ties, protection of languages and knowledge.
Within this new framework, Selk'nam organisations are already advocating for concrete projects. In Tierra del Fuego, indigenous mapping projects for Selk'nam, Yagán and Haush territories explore how to rename landscapes using indigenous languages and historical pathways. A touring light artwork — Obra lumínica por el reconocimiento y la reparación del pueblo selknam — brings these questions of memory and justice to Porvenir and other southern cities, linking contemporary art, archives and family voices.
For the Selk'nam, the 2023 recognition thus marks a change of scale: from a people long described as "disappeared" in official discourse, to a living people, bearer of rights, knowledge and possible futures on their own land. For the Chilean State, it opens the obligation to build public policies in dialogue with these communities — not in their place.
Once is not always the norm aboard the sailing vessel Milagro — and following Callisphyris leptopus Philippi: in mid-April 2026, with Ben, Milena, Gabriel, Damien and Lauriane, as we were leaving one of the arms of Bahía Tres Brazos, a bay located to the north-west of Gordon Island, we received a new visitor that would give us quite a headache: an adult male Cercophana frauenfeldii.
We will not hide from you that identifying this species was no easy feat — friends and acquaintances alike were all astonished by our photographs. After checking the GBIF database, we found that our observation appears to be among the southernmost research‑grade records of Cercophana frauenfeldii currently available there. This underlines how integrating opportunistic observations into open platforms such as iNaturalist and GBIF can complement existing Chilean work by documenting species in remote places where access and sampling are logistically demanding.
Photographed aboard the sailing vessel Milagro, mid-April 2026 in the morning, during an expedition in the canals of the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve.
Here a detailed spotlight on an uncommonly encountered nocturnal visitor in these waters!
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Introduction
Cercophana frauenfeldii Felder, 1862 is a large Neotropical Saturniidae endemic to Chile, also known by the English common name "Andean Moon Moth" on account of its Andean range and its resemblance to a "lunar sphinx". Over the last decades, Chilean and South American entomologists have provided key information on the taxonomy, life cycle and host plants of C. frauenfeldii, from its northern range to Magallanes. Recent work has clarified the immature stages, phenology and host associations, laying the groundwork for interpreting new records such as ours.
In the second half of the 20th century, C. frauenfeldii was incorporated into syntheses on the Chilean Saturniidae fauna, particularly in revisional works on the family and the genera Cercophana and Neocercophana. More recent studies (2021) have complemented these approaches by describing the immature stages (egg, larva, caterpillar, cocoon…), the phenology, the species' distribution and its host plants.
Taxonomy, Morphological Characters and Developmental Stages
1. Original Description and Nomenclatural Status
The species was described by Felder in 1862 under the name Cercophana frauenfeldi, based on material from continental Chile, making it one of the first South American Saturniidae to be formally described. Modern catalogues of the Saturniidae family in Chile confirm this status, retaining the spelling frauenfeldii (with a double "i") as valid and placing it in the genus Cercophana Felder, 1862.
Revisions of the family in South America recognise Cercophana as a small Andean genus restricted to Chile, grouping C. frauenfeldii and a few closely related species including Cercophana venusta, distinct from the neighbouring genus Neocercophana described later for related taxa. Regional catalogues of Argentine Saturniidae also list this species as an element of the trans-border Andean fauna.
2. General Morphological Characters
Works on Chilean Saturniidae describe Cercophana frauenfeldii as a large nocturnal moth with broadly developed wings, varying from brown-ochre to greenish in colour, with lighter patterns and variable transparent or hyaline markings. In adults, sexual dimorphism is expressed through strongly bipectinate antennae in the male, adapted for pheromone detection, while females typically have a more voluminous abdomen associated with egg production.
A recent article in the Brazilian Journal of Entomology, dedicated to the immature stages, describes in detail the egg, the four larval stages, the pupa and the cocoon, providing a complete morphological basis for identification at all stages of development.
3. Immature Stages and Development
The detailed study of the immature stages of Cercophana frauenfeldii shows that larval development comprises four well-differentiated instars, generally spanning from November to late January throughout most of the species' range. The caterpillars feed on the leaves of their host plants, displaying primarily nocturnal activity and concealing themselves among foliage during the day.
Pupation occurs within a silken cocoon whose structure and location may vary depending on habitat conditions, but which is generally situated in the leaf litter or on low-hanging branches.
Geographical Distribution in Chile
1. Latitudinal Gradient and Biogeographical Provinces
Chilean catalogues and syntheses record Cercophana frauenfeldii from the centre of the country to the humid temperate regions of the south, particularly in the Maule, Biobío, La Araucanía, Los Lagos and Aysén regions. A recent compilation of field data and naturalist collections confirms that the species follows an Andean-coastal gradient associated with temperate forests.
TA synthesis of published records and naturalist collections suggests two broad phenological and biogeographical groupings: the northern group, where adults fly mainly from February to mid-April, and the southern group (temperate rainforests), where the main flight period shifts to between April and June (the case of our visitor).
2. Southward Extension and the Magallanes Region
Works specifically addressing the Magallanes region highlight that C. frauenfeldii reaches the southern part of continental Chile, where it remains more localised. An article focused on the host plants of this moth confirms the presence of populations in temperate forests close to the southern limit of distribution of the host tree species, primarily belonging to three families: Gomortegaceae, Lauraceae and Winteraceae. The plants most represented in the studies conducted are Cryptocarya alba, Beilschmiedia miersii, Gomortega keule and Persea americana, all of which develop further north than our visitor.
While published records are concentrated mainly at sites further north than the Chilean Antarctic province where we explore, records from the Magallanes region make the species' presence in sub-Antarctic archipelagos plausible. According to observations made in 2003 in Parque Omora (Puerto Williams), this moth also uses the canelo or Magellan pepper (Drimys winteri) as a host plant, and this tree is ubiquitous in the Province of Cabo de Hornos.
The most recent works stress the need to better document the fine-scale distribution, phenotypic variability and population genetics of Cercophana frauenfeldii from the north-central to the far south of Chile.
Scientific Significance of This Local Record
Although this record has not yet been incorporated into Chilean academic syntheses, it is fully consistent with the documented distribution of C. frauenfeldii as far south as Magallanes and with the continuity of native forests in the region. Rather than revealing a major range extension, the observation adds a documented island locality within the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve, in line with previous work from Magallanes and with the widespread presence of the host tree Drimys winteri in the Province of Cabo de Hornos.
This single opportunistic record does not allow any inference about population size, persistence or trends on Gordon Island. It should therefore be interpreted as an initial indication of presence rather than the result of a systematic survey. Nevertheless, it illustrates how small‑scale observations can help refine the fine‑scale distribution of forest‑associated moths in southern Chile, especially in sub‑Antarctic archipelagos that are logistically difficult to sample.
In the far south of Patagonia, targeted nocturnal sampling campaigns—combining light‑based methods with searches for larvae on potential host plants, ideally in collaboration with Chilean entomologists and institutions—would be needed to confirm and quantify the presence of C. frauenfeldii on Gordon Island and neighbouring islands. On‑board naturalist monitoring programmes such as those conducted by Association Karukinka can contribute complementary observations to national and international entomological databases, but they are best seen as a small part of a broader, long‑term research effort led by Chilean teams.
In the peatlands of Tierra del Fuego and the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve, two groups of non-vascular plants quietly rule over landscapes that might seem hostile to any form of dense life: peat mosses (Sphagnum) and liverworts. Tiny to the naked eye, these bryophytes nevertheless structure one of the carbon-richest and most biodiverse ecosystems in the Southern Hemisphere. Aboard the sailing vessel Milagro, during our expeditions through the southern channels of Tierra del Fuego, we observed them everywhere — on the bark of southern beeches (Nothofagus), on spray-battered shoreline rocks, on the spongy soils of the peat bogs. These are the plants that form the "miniature forests" described by biologist Ricardo Rozzi and the research team at Parque Omora.
Peatlands in Gordon island, Expedition Karukinka, February 2026
Sphagnum peatlands: sponges of carbon and water
Tierra del Fuego's peatlands formed between 15,000 and 10,000 years BP, in the wake of the last Quaternary glaciation. Today they cover a significant share of the landscape of the Isla Grande (notably the Mitre Peninsula), particularly in the wettest and least disturbed areas south of the Strait of Magellan.
The dominant species is Sphagnum magellanicum Brid., known locally as musgo pompón. This peat moss structures the peatland matrix by saturating soils with water, lowering pH and slowing the decomposition of organic matter — processes that lead to peat accumulation over sometimes considerable depths. The associated ecosystem services are multiple: regulation of hydrological processes, carbon capture and storage, habitat provision, and maintenance of water quality.
Within the peat itself, floristic composition is remarkably homogeneous. The environmental factor that best explains compositional variation between peatlands is water table height rather than species richness — underlining the importance of an intact hydrological regime for the conservation of these ecosystems.
On the Argentine side of the Isla Grande, the glacial valley of Carbajal, north of Ushuaia, flanked by the Sierra Alvear and drained by the Río Olivia, hosts an extensive domed peat plain dotted with lagoons. This site has become a pilot research area for Argentine science on subantarctic peatlands. Studies conducted by CADIC/CONICET and partner institutions use the Carbajal wetland as a case study to quantify carbon stocks, analyse the hydrological regulation role of these peatlands for Ushuaia, and assess the impacts of peat extraction on ecosystem stability.
A global bryophyte hotspot
The Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve is recognised as one of the world's centres of bryophyte diversity. On less than 0.01% of the world's land surface, the region concentrates more than 5% of all known bryophyte species, with a high proportion of endemics. Across the reserve, more than 300 liverwort species and 450 moss species have been recorded.
This richness is a direct product of climatic conditions: the humid temperate forests receive abundant rainfall in a remarkably pure atmosphere, free of air pollutants. The bryophytes and lichens that colonise trunks, rocks and soils are poikilohydric — capable of suspending their metabolism during temporary drought and resuming it rapidly upon rehydration — which makes them particularly resilient to freeze-thaw cycles.
During the Milagro expedition of February 2026, lichens and liverworts were observed and photographed at several sites on Gordon Island. Their identification benefited from the assistance of Ricardo Rozzi and José German Gonzalez Calderon, to whom the team extends its gratitude.
Liverworts: pioneers and indicators
Liverworts (division Marchantiophyta) form a distinct group within bryophytes, separate from mosses and hornworts. In the subantarctic forests of Cape Horn, they preferentially colonise Nothofagus trunks, dead wood and humid woodland edges, forming flat or cushion-shaped mats of a characteristic deep green.
Their sensitivity to atmospheric conditions makes them excellent bioindicators of air quality and ecosystem integrity. The Omora Ethnobotanical Park (Puerto Williams) uses them as educational mediators with local schools, to anchor in children an awareness of the global value of their territory's biodiversity.
Ecological roles in forests and bogs
In humid subantarctic forests, peat mosses and liverworts form thick mantles capable of retaining large quantities of water and regulating local moisture. They act as natural sponges, buffering the impact of frequent rainfall, limiting erosion and stabilising micro-habitats.
In the peatlands, peat mosses structure the saturated matrix that simultaneously stores water and large amounts of carbon — a role of particular strategic importance in the context of climate change. Precipitation in Patagonia is estimated to decrease by 10–20% by the end of the century, which would directly threaten the hydrological integrity of these ecosystems.
Peatlands of Tierra del Fuego photographed in Carbajal Valley (February 2013, cc Sébastien Pons)
Lichens, frequently associated with bryophytes on the same substrates, play a pioneer role on bare rock and glacial moraines, initiating soil formation that will later allow mosses and then vascular plants to establish themselves.
Threats and conservation
Bryophyte communities remain vulnerable to trampling, hydrological modification and the long-term effects of climate change. Disturbances caused by introduced species — particularly the North American beaver (Castor canadensis), introduced to Tierra del Fuego in the 1940s — profoundly alter watercourses and peatlands, indirectly modifying the substrates and microclimatic conditions that these miniature forests require.
Commercial harvesting of Sphagnum magellanicum for horticulture represents an additional pressure: this activity began around twenty years ago further north, in the Los Lagos and Magallanes regions, and its impact on natural populations is the subject of ongoing sustainable management efforts.
At the southeastern tip of the Isla Grande, the Mitre Peninsula extends this peatland belt toward the Atlantic. This almost uninhabited headland concentrates approximately 84–85% of Argentina's total peatland area: nearly 193,000 hectares of peat bogs out of a provincial total estimated at 270,000 hectares. In December 2022, Provincial Law No. 1461 created the Área Natural Protegida Península Mitre, integrated into Tierra del Fuego's protected-area system. Studies coordinated by CADIC/CONICET and local organisations show that these peatlands rank among Argentina's largest carbon reservoirs: they store the equivalent of several years of national carbon dioxide emissions, and have been recognised by the United Nations Environment Programme as one of the eleven most important peatland ecosystems on Earth.
Ecoturismo con lupa: seeing the world differently
To promote and protect this discreet biodiversity, the Omora Park team developed the concept of Ecoturismo con lupa (hand-lens ecotourism): an approach that places the discovery of mosses, liverworts and lichens at the centre of the visitor experience, within a "field environmental philosophy". Armed with a simple magnifying glass, visitors are guided to observe the bosques en miniatura and understand their ecological role.
This approach, documented in the film Viaje Invisible. Ecoturismo con Lupa (2013), illustrates how millimetre-scale biodiversity can transform a forest walk into a fully-fledged scientific exploration.
Bibliography
DOMÍNGUEZ, E. et al. Floristic biodiversity present in Sphagnum peatland bogs. Anales del Instituto de la Patagonia, 2021.
GOFFINET, B., ROZZI, R., MASSARDO, F. et al. Miniature Forests of Cape Horn: Ecotourism with a Hand Lens. University of North Texas Press, 2012.
ODEPA/INFOR. Musgo Sphagnum: manejo sostenible del recurso. Gobierno de Chile, 2018.
PIONTELLI, E. Sphagnum magellanicum Brid. en Chile. Boletín Micológico, 2008.
ROZZI, R. (coord.). Ecoturismo con lupa en el Parque Omora. Universidad de Magallanes.
SALINAS, J. et al. Generando conocimiento para el desarrollo de cultivos sustentables de Sphagnum. Revista INFOR, 2021.
VILA, I. et al. Ictiofauna en los sistemas límnicos de la Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego. Revista Biología Marina, 1999.
VILLAGRA, J. et al. Sphagnum peatland bog, Magallanes. Anales del Instituto de la Patagonia, 2004.
