LICHEN
I’ve been reading Crow Planet. There is a sentence about the astonishing amount of life there is in even the tiniest things. In this case, the author was referring to moss that contained tiny insect larva that crows feed on.
That got me off to Google, where I soon came across the subject of cryptobiotic soils, a highly specialized community of bacteria, mosses, and lichen found in deserts and other arid areas. They form a protective crust that captures nitrogen and water and provides a place for seeds to take root.
From cryptobiotic soils it was but a hop skip and a jump to lichen. What a wonderful word. I assumed it was Nordic in origin, but the word actually derives from the Greek leichen, meaning lick. To the Greeks, lichen grew like a fire, licking along the trunk of a tree.
I can remember as a kid growing up in New England being fascinated by the green crust that grew on rocks everywhere. There was an alien quality to them that attracted my curiosity.
Lichens are a partnership between fungi and algae. The fungal partner gets sugar, the byproduct of the algae’s photosynthesis. The algal partner gets to live in a protected environment formed by the fungus.
The earliest forms of lichens date back some 400 million years. There are anywhere from 13,500 to 17,000 species of lichen. No one knows how long lichen live, but certainly it can be hundreds of years. Some would argue they live forever.
November 9, 2009
| blog comments powered by Disqus |
