#nostoc

Scytinium turgidum

When I see people tag my lichen posts with #plant, I have to admit, a part of me dies inside. Because like, cyanolichens like S. turgidum have no plants parts. This guy is composed of an ascomycete fungi and a cyanobacteria -- no plants involved whatsoever. This jelly lichen grows on calcareous rock often inundated with runoff. It has shiny red-black to blackish-olive lobes which are wrinkled and thin when dry, thick and gelatinous when wet. The upper surface is covered in granular isidia, and often brownish-red apothecia. S. turgidum has a Nostoc photobiont.

images: source

Nostoc pruniforme

Lawn repair

With an increasing nostoc colony, we straw-broomed a test part of our lawn, blew away as much nostoc as possible, and applied some special lawn sand.

With much of the minka's front lawn having been a tanbo, the original owners applied road gravel over hard clay, and with the thin layer of grass it does not drain - promoting the nasty, smelly, moss growth.

cc: "Nostoc are a genus of cyanobacteria known for gathering their thin, thread-like bodies into gelatinous colonies, forming what look like, basically, a weird noodle soup. Of course you might not want your bowl of noodle soup to be bright green like this, and that is fair. But outside the world of imagined meals, the color of cyanobacteria like nostoc are an indicator of their life-sustaining ability, turning their chlorophyll into a vivid display as they reflect green wavelengths into our vision. Then, with a flick of a switch, we can change the light on our sample from white light to ultraviolet light and everything changes. Our soup of filaments is now a bright, bright red, like we just doused our noodles in hot sauce."

Journey to the Microcosmos- Revealing the Hidden Colors of the Microcosmos

Images Originally Captured by Jam's Germs

Gabura fascicularis 

I am a pretty avid fan of sci-fi, and so I love me some fun alien design. And in recent years, we have had some much more interesting and nuanced takes on what communication between vastly different organisms might look like than the classic Star Trek universal-translator hand-wavey nonsense. But I so rarely see good examples of chemoreception in sci-fi--hell, we don't even classify chemosensing as one of the basic senses, and it is how the vast majority of life on earth communicates! And it's incredible! Take G. fasicularis, a symbiotic organisms whose main constituents are an ascomycete fungi and a cyanobacteria. These organisms are so vastly different from one another that they are in different Domains of life! We are more closely related to ascomycete fungi that it is to cyanobacteria, but somehow, using chemical compounds as their means of communication, they are able to find each other and thrive together in a lichen thallus. And we are just barely beginning to understand how this process works all around us on our own planet. Isn't that nuts? And to be fair, in Star Trek: Discovery 4x12, they finally did have a chemoreceptive alien species attempting to communicate with humans which was pretty great, so I can't say Star Trek falls back on hand-wavey bullshit all the time.

images: source | source

Nephroma laevigatum

Mustard kidney lichen

This foliose cyanolichen has large, thick lobes that grow in loose rosettes up to 20 cm in diameter. The upper surface of the lobes is smooth and glossy, and typically bronze to brown-gray to gray-blue in color. The lower surface is pale brown, darkening to black toward the center. The medulla (the middle layer) is distinctly pale to mustard yellow. Nephroma lichens get their name from their kidney-shaped apothecia which notably grow on the lower surface. Why? I don't know, but it's a bold choice which I highly respect. The apothecia of N. laevigatum are reddish-orangish-brownish. Chestnut colored, if you will. It colonizes mossy bark and rocks in humid, temperate to subtropical, old growth woodlands.

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