Symbio…..

In the Planet Earth instruction book it says, add light and heat, stabilise the geology a bit, hurl a few meteors at it, add water and stir for a billion or three human years, occasionally adding a pinch of comet debris. Thats from the Acme Junior, Build Your Own Solar System kit. The Earth came with a free moon too but Wylie Coyote brought the whole production run. As instructions go its not to far from the truth either. Animated minerals combined and entwined in dance of lego complexity during the early history of our planet, and with a lot of shaking we now have a plethora of living things on our planet. Shame that we, humanity, are becoming the extinction queens and deadlier to life on Earth than the meteor that took out the dinosaurs was. Even my own government only a few days ago allowed the use of bee killing pesticides here in Britain, and with badgers being shot left right and centre, you may be wondering what if any wildlife will be left in the UK? This article is not about the human decimation of the animal kingdom, or the fact that without Europes laws Britain is about to embrace experimental genetically modified crops as our main source of food, or any of the other painful viral, economic, or social issues that are around at this time. No! This article is not about the boring stuff of politic! It’s not about Boris! Or left! Or right! (Although it will make one political observation at the end.) This article is all about Lichen!

Having used six exclamation marks to get you to this sentence lets hit you with the stuff that makes lichen amazing. It starts with the question what are they? Ask yourself what they are, right now, and take on board that lichen cover between 6-8% of the land mass of planet Earth, seriously if lichen were an empire, well. “The sun never sets on the lichen empire.” Yet what are they? Neither plant nor fungus nor bacteria, but they are combinations of them, fungus, plant or bacteria, they are generally two of the three. You see whilst zillions of generations of humans have been waging warfare for every conceivable reason up to and including Helen of bleeding Troy, lichen have been cooperating with each other to thrive. Having evolved several times throughout the tree of life, lichen are symbiotic organisms. At somewhen in history fungi and algae banded together, at another somewhen fungi and Cyanobacteria banded together. There are even triumvirate combinations of all three, three totally different organisms have become one recognisable species. This beneficial relationship combination is called symbiosis, although there are some parasitic elements in certain lichen too. The diversity of these combinations is mind blowing in its shape and colour variations, lichen can thrive anywhere that there is good air quality. Listen they can live inside and outside of rocks, abandoned rubber car tyres, bones, walls, arctic tundra, forests, deserts, non arctic tundra and even toxic slag heaps. Pretty much any surface could become home to lichen. None of the diverse organisms can survive well if at all without the others.

Lichen are sort of self contained tiny weeny ecosystems. For the sake of simplicity I will break them into two groups, (this is a lie but it is the simplest way of explaining the roller coaster evolution landslide known as Lichens.) Cyanobacteria and algal families. Now the algae are plants, whilst the other are bacteria, the common denominator is that they both photosynthesise, (converting sunlight into energy that is usually in the form of glucose. (Sugars.)) Now, wrap a fungi or three around them and all of the organisms can convert sunlight to energy, and that combination has become self sufficient, a single collaborative entity. Many of the fungal elements have lost the ability to feed beyond the photosynthetic as a result, add water and away you go. Now to us humans we identify any of the 20000 types of lichen using the fungal element, which is external to the synthesiser. We call the fungal element a mycobiont, but as about 20% of all fungal species have adapted to lichenisation and evolved to live as a symbiont, then it appears to be a very successful win/win for the organisms involved. Technically the same can be said for the photosynthetic organism, known scientifically as photobionts. Yet that win/win relationship is key to the success of lichens globally, now add more elements, and the complexity of the lichen can increase. Then look at the other organisms in the micro environments and observe the relationships that have evolved.

Look putting aside the entire dictionary section that is dedicated to different lichen systems, what makes them a hard core species? Without whimsy one of the worlds oldest organisms is a Lichen. It is an arctic species called Map Lichen, one is estimated to be 8600 years old. Which for the record, predates most human farming, and it appears to still be going strong, so who knows how long it will live. The European Space Agency ran an experiment and lichen can survive in space. A more recent study showed that they remain viable after being exposed to space for over a year and a half. A year ago Steve, (thats me the guy writing this,) who has killed every plant he has ever tried to grow, found a little lichen on a fallen bit of tree bark, it is still alive and lives in an old coffee cup, it’s my pet lichen and it’s name is Symbio, and it’s still alive. Capable of living well in the most extreme environments, now covering 6-8% of the Earths surface, longevity, strength, and amazing cooperative relationships. Thats what lichen are, a hybrid combination that now retails everywhere on Earth. Collaborators of organic harmonies, and sadly lichenisation is not yet an official word. However these words are simply an introduction to lichen, sort of a dare you to read up on them, look out for them too, because if there are no lichen on the walls of your neighbourhood, then you should run away, as the only thing besides the ocean that thwarts them is poor air quality, and poor air quality is bad for you. Now at the beginning I did promise a political observation. It is this. Lichen have achieved all this and more without a single recognisable brain cell. Hmmmmm.