Your Daily Lichen Blog

Lecidea perlatolica

Pseudocyphellaria rainierensis

Oldgrowth specklebelly lichen

Met a cool dude at a lichen conference a few years back who was brave enough to ride in shotgun for me across the great state of Idaho, and he introduced me to to the gorgeous P. rainierensis. This foliose lichen has a loose, ragged-looking thallus with lobes varying in length from 1.5 cm to 20 cm. The upper surface is a pale blue-gray and dimpled to wrinkly in texture. It produces marginal and occasionally laminal lobules and isidia. The lower surface is pale tan to cream, and dotted with pseudocyphellae (pores through the surface to the middle layer of the lichen thallus). P. rainierensis is native to the old growth, temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest of North America. It is rare, and recent reports suggest it is declining. But I am happy to see that lichenologists are working on monitoring it in the wild (and using iNaturalist as one of their tools to do so), and working towards public-private partnerships to protect this awesome dude well into the future. (shout out to my pal Stephen T. Sharrett for his hard work and important contributions leading the way toward a brighter future for this and other imperiled PNW lichens. I wanna be him when I grow up)

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Ah, so the lichen that started growing on your car started out as one of 2 things:

A sexually reproduced fungal spore:

Photobiont sold separately. They somehow met, came together, and grew into a lichen.

2. An asexual propagule, aka a soridium (fungal hyphae tangled around a bundle of photobiont cells) or an isidum (a small piece of thallus surrounded by cortex made to detach from the surface).

So if in the form of a soredium or isidium, photobiont cells and fungal cells are transported, established, and grown together, but in the case of fungal spores, photobiont cells are sold separately. How do they find each other? Well, we aren't entirely sure. The prevailing theory is that there billions of photobiont cells and lichenized fungal spores out there, and that makes the 1 in million chance that the right constituents find each other less of a long shot that one would think.

i learned about lichens being like. the organisms they are through the book Entangled Life and hoooo boy i thought i was obsessed with mushrooms but here comes lichens with the steel chair

anyway my favourite fact is that lichens can indicate air quality :) if you only see crustose lichens, which are more resistant to air pollution, then you're likely to be in a low quality air area (like an urban city) but if you see long branchose lichens, which are less resistant to air pollution, then you're likely to be in a high quality air area (i saw sooo much of them in The Eden Project :3)

I have yet to read the book but I have heard good things! I will have to give it a try when I have more time (lol like that's ever gonna happen).

I wanted to share some of the really nice lichens I saw today in Mount Desert, Maine!

Biatora subduplex

This crustose lichen is common on plant debris, stumps, and tree bases in alpine and subarctic habitats, but has probably gone largely overlooked throughout much of its range since it is small, subtle, and easily confused with similar looking species. It has a pale, crustose thallus and produces orange- to red-brown, biatorine (with soft, non-carbonized, true margins) apothecia. The phylogeny of this species was elucidated in 2023 using genetics, but the morphological analysis showed an overlap between most morphological characteristics between the most difficult to differentiate taxa. Sometimes, that's just how the lichen crumbles, I guess. The authors suggest that greater sampling or inclusion of more morphological characters could help, but that for now, the best morphological character used to differentiate these species is the number of hyphae and paraphyses (sterile filaments in the apothecia structurally supporting the spore-producing structures) and densely packed into the apothecial margin and hymenium (area of the apothecia where spores are produced). As this requires careful dissection of the tiny apothecia and counting the number of microscopic filaments within a 50 µm area, you get why folks might avoid identifying these specimens down to the species level. That's just the joy of lichenology, I guess.

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Hoo boy, that's the question, huh?

So, fungi are a lot of things. "Fungi" is an entire kingdom of life, like "Plantae" (plants) or "Animalia" animals. Consider how much diversity there is within those 2 groups, and now shift your perception of what a fungi can look like to that level of complexity. In, say, animals, those complex differences are pretty obvious when looking at like, a clam vs a honeybee vs a crocodile vs a human. But in fungi, most of that complexity isn't super visible to the human eye because most fungi are small and cryptic, so it gets overlooked even though the diversity is there.

"Mushrooms" are the fruiting bodies of basidiomycete fungi: just one division of the entire fungal kingdom. A fruiting body is like, well, a fruit! It is a reproductive structure that releases spores, which are like the seeds of plants. These structures are attached to a "mycelium," a connected network of fungal hyphea (long filaments containing fungal cells). Think of the mycelium as like, the trunk of a tree, and the mushroom as an apple.

Not all fungi have a mycelium (the same way not all plants have a trunk)--many are unicellular organisms, and others have simpler body plans, and some (like lichens) have more complicated body plans.

Besides basidiomycete mushrooms, ascomycete fungi produce mostly "cup-shaped" fruiting bodies, often referred to as "mushrooms" even though they aren't technically mushrooms. Confused yet? Stick with me. What is a lichen? Lichenization (a fungus forming a symbiotic relationship with a photosynthesizing organism) is a lifestyle trait more than it is a distinct group. While most "lichens" are ascomycete fungi, there are some basidiomycete fungi that have lichenized as well. It is a way for a fungi (we call it the mycobiont) to basically "farm" algae and/or cyanobacteria (we call these the photobionts) to harvest energy from, and in return the mycobiont provides the photobiont with a safe environment.

Most lichens have "apothecia" as seen in the picture above: the cup-shaped fruiting bodies often found in the ascomycete fungi. BUT some (very few) lichens actually *have* mushrooms because they are a symbiosis between an algae and a mushroom-producing fungi (basidiomycete):

SO to conclude: --Fungi is a diverse kingdom of life --Mushrooms are a reproductive structure of a specific lineage of fungi --Lichens are a symbiotic organism made up of a fungus and a photosynthesizing organism (algae and/or cyanobacteria) --Most lichenized fungi are ascomycetes, but some are basidiomycetes --You can think of lichenization as a lifestyle as opposed to a specific group

Cladonia ceratophylla

Unlike many members of the Cladonia genus with conspicuous podetia much larger than the basal thallus, C. ceratophylla has a prominent basal thallus made up of broad, branching lobes topped by thin, relatively small podetia. These lobes are recurved, with a smooth, green upper surface, and a pale, rhizinate lower surface. The upper half of podetia are covered in thin, overlapping, needle-shaped microlobules, a defining feature of this species. C. ceratophylla grows on mossy soil in humid-tropical regions of Central America and South America, including the Galapagos Islands.

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Identify pls