Orange Lichen

Lichens are Odd Fellows

Orange Lichen (Teloschistes exilis)
on a Parmotrema sp.
(Click on the photo for a better view)

A couple of really nice lichens. . I have photographed a lot of them, and now I guess it's time to invest in Brodo's book - "Lichens of North America". See here at Amazon.com.

Update: Whoohooo! the book is Ordered. Second Update: It's here, all 8 1/2 lbs.
According to Irwin Brodo, the two species are Teleoschistes and Parmotrema.

Lichens are symbiotic associations of a fungus (the mycobiont) with a photosynthetic partner (the photobiont also known as the phycobiont) that can produce food for the lichen from sunlight. The photobiont is usually either green alga or cyanobacterium. A few lichens are known to contain yellow-green algae or, in one case, a brown alga. Some lichens contain both green algae and cyanobacteria as photobionts; in these cases, the cyanobacteria symbiont component may specialize in fixing atmospheric nitrogen for metabolic use.

In the natural environment, lichen "provides" the alga with water and minerals that the fungus absorbs from whatever the lichen is growing on, its substrate. As for the alga, it uses the minerals and water to make food for the fungus and itself. Algal and fungal components of some lichens have been cultured separately under laboratory conditions, but in the natural environment of a lichen, neither can grow and reproduce without a symbiotic partner. Indeed, although strains of cyanobacteria found in various cyanolichens are often closely related to one another, they differ from the most closely related free-living strains. The lichen association is a close symbiosis: It extends the ecological range of both partners and is obligatory for their growth and reproduction in natural environoments. Propagules ("diaspores") typically contain cells from both partners, although the fungal components of so-called "fringe species" rely instead on algal cells dispersed by the "core species".

Troy and Martha

These odd posts all started over at Katney's.