The Nikon MicroscopyU confocal microscopy image gallery was created with a PCM-2000 confocal scanning system interfaced to a Nikon Eclipse E600 upright microscope. Images were recorded in successive z-axis serial sections with C-Imaging Systems software with excitation illumination provided by an argon-ion and/or a helium-neon laser.

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Marram is the common name for a beach grass that grows on the sandy coasts of Europe, North America, and North Africa and is also known as psamma or sand reed. These course and hardy grasses grow in tufts producing tightly rolled spike-like leaves that are naturally resistant to wind and salt spray. The term marram is of old Norse origin and combines marr, meaning sea, with haulm which translates into stalk.

Beach grass forms tough scaly underground stems that can extend between 30 and 45 feet beyond the parent plant. The plant's rhizomes are tenacious root-like stems that grow horizontally to form creeping networks that can bind otherwise loose and shifting coastal sands. Evolved as an efficient sleuth for new water sources, these plants thrive in arid environments.

Beach grass has the unusually ability to grow most vigorously on seaward slopes where it is regularly buried by windblown sands. The subterranean stem, with its deposits of food reserves, also colonizes dunes by easily sprouting healthy new shoots from underneath freshly deposited sand. By stabilizing shifting sands, the rhizomal network also enables other vegetation to take root. In the United States, marram has become the plant of choice in abating sand erosion near shorelines.

American beech grass, Ammophilia breviligulata, grows along the Atlantic coast and in the Great Lakes region. European beach grass, A. arenaria, has been imported to the northern pacific coast of the United States as a dune stabilizer. Organisms that afflict beach grass include fungi and nematodes.