#lichens

[lichenaday]

Me: Why do I have so much neck and back and knee pain?

Also me:

Lichenology is neither for the faint of heart nor the weak of joint.

[botanyshitposts]

the lichen knowledge iceberg i have constructed on request

[bruisedmooons]

It's spring but the woods are full of moss, lichen and a mushroom kingdom growing from a tree stump. How amazing is this!

[herpsandbirds]

More scenery from Redwoods National Park in northern CA, USA.

photographs by Paxon Kale CC

[michaelnordeman]

Appreciating the small things. Värmland, Sweden (March 29, 2024).

[seabeck]

Lichen

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Rare lichen brought back to East Anglia with help of bookbinding glue

Small patches of scrambled egg lichen moved from Cornwall to Breckland region, where it was last seen in 1994

This is such a cool story! Conservation of endangered species cants heavily toward animals and then plants, but you rarely see efforts to try to help endangered fungi, lichenized or otherwise. Part of this is because many fungi are very difficult to propagate, particularly those that have mycorrhizal relationships with plants, and so the best way to save them is to protect critical habitat for those species. Moreover, fungi that produce fruiting bodies like mushrooms are only really easy to observe during their relatively short fruiting season, so unless you're searching the soil or other substrate for DNA traces, your window to actually survey rare fungi is quite short.

But lichens are different. They persist year after year, and so are easier to observe. Growing them is another story, though; most people who give it a try put fragments of a given lichen on a favorable substrate in a controlled environment and hope for the best. However, success is relatively rare in the long term as lichens are quite persnickety about their growing conditions.

So what about just moving the whole substrate? If you have lichens that conveniently grow on tree branches you could cut off piece of branch and then attach them to branches of the same species of tree elsewhere at the same height/sun exposure/humidity level, and hope that the lichens continue to produce spores that then find favorable substrates locally. But it's tougher to chip off chunks of rock and move them to new places, especially if you don't want them getting kicked around.

So it's really fascinating that these conservationists tried out all sorts of different glues to find the most lichen-friendly ones, and then glued them to new substrates in old parts of their range in the hope that they'll use their rhizines to attach themselves to their new homes. It shows how much detail we have to go into in habitat restoration and species conservation to try to replicate the best conditions for a given species to thrive, and how we can't just offer degraded habitats to our wildlife of various sorts and hope that they find it acceptable. Lichens like various Parmelia species or Evernia prunastri may not be as picky in their substrates, but for a rarer species like Gyalolechia fulgens, our task is to give them their Goldilocks substrate--just right. And sometimes helping them along involves a little bookbinding glue.