In middle school we rote learn that nature is a contest and only the fittest survive. But what if that is not entirely correct? So, it is worth pausing over a life form that has quietly declined to play by those rules — and forced scientists to rewrite the textbook. In this lovely piece of nature writing, Lynda V. Mapes introduces us to the lichen and to the radical idea it turns out to embody.
Nobody is actually sure ‘What exactly is a lichen?”. As Ms Mapes writes, “they have puzzled scientists for more than a century as to just what they even are”. Yet, they are everywhere. “They blow like green scarves from trees, crust rocks, frost fences, paint bark, and glow on roofs, tombstones, blue tarps — really anything that will stay still for a bit can be a swell home for a lichen.” They are also astonishingly hardy: “One of earth’s most adaptable forms of life, lichens live on every continent and have passed multiple tests of their ability to survive in outer space, even for months.”
They also earn their keep: “Beyond their persistence, lichens are productive: They bind and build soil. Work as bioindicators of air pollution and climate change. Produce nitrogen from thin air that feeds the forest floor and wildlife. Hummingbirds and bushtits gather lichens to wind into their nests. Ungulates, including caribou, elk and deer, subsist on lichens in winter, when other foods are scarce.” All from an organism that asks almost nothing of the world: “Self-sufficient, lichens have no roots, no vascular tissue, make their own food and don’t need pollinators to reproduce.”
Quiet as they seem, lichens are not passive — some “wage mighty battles to define their boundaries, deploying chemical warfare, visible in a black line around their borders, to keep other lichens or their mortal enemy, moss, from encroaching, and even growing right on top of them, snuffing them out.”
A lichen is not a moss, not any other plant, not even, strictly, an individual organism — yet it gave us the word for what it is: “lichens inspired a German botanist in 1877 to coin the word symbiosis in biology, to describe more than one species living together in long-term close association.” As first understood, a lichen was a partnership of two — “an alliance between an alga that makes the food through photosynthesis and a fungus, which provides the physical structure that gives the lichen its shape and anchors it to a surface, such as a rock or tree.”
That was a subversive idea in its day. “The idea that such a relationship could be neutral — or parasitical but also beneficial — was radical, following the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species,’ in which he centered natural selection through competition as the primary driver of evolution.” Nature, in other words, was not only “red of tooth and claw,” as Darwin taught. “Instead, lichens point to many interactions in nature in which entities persist by giving something to one another.”
Lichens are also keepers of records. Curated at the Burke Muserum’s Herbarium are more than 700,000 specimens, they become “living archives. Changes in their presence, absence or health reflect local climate history, air quality and even cataclysmic events, both natural and human-caused. In their quiet testimony, lichens tell us things we need to hear about our changing world.” Some of it is remarkably precise: “Lichens from the Elwha River valley on the Olympic Peninsula narrate ecological change before and after dam removal on the Elwha, which was completed in 2014. Other samples of lichens collected from the Spirit Lake area at Mount St. Helens bracket the volcano’s 1980 eruption.”
But lichens have a way of blowing things open, as Toby Spribille discovered. “It was Spribille who revealed that lichens are not a twosome at all, but actually a ménage à trois, with a hitherto overlooked partner — for some 140 years.” In a 2016 paper in the renowned journal, Science, his team’s “genetic analysis found that lichens aren’t just the result of a single fungus and a photosynthesizing partner (be it an alga, a cyanobacteria, or both.) They found there also is a second fungus, a yeast, in the mix.”
“We underestimated lichens for a very long time,” Spribille tells Ms Mapes. “It is not so much that people in the past got it wrong, as that they were missing a part of the picture, with the tools they had available to them, before the advent of genomics and modern molecular DNA sequencing.” He adds: “There are a lot of different sorts of mashups out there in lichen symbiosis.” “We are just beginning to scratch the surface.”
The deepest reading comes from Trevor Goward, co-curator of lichen at the University of British Columbia. He says: “There are animals that feed on them, reindeer and caribou would not exist without them, they are beautiful, they color our world, they grow where other things don’t grow, they can live where nothing else can, they have the capacity to grow everywhere.” They are, in Ms Mapes’s phrase, “that example in nature in which one plus one equals … three,” which is perhaps why they have confounded science for so long. “Science is reductionist,” Goward says. “The study of biology reduces life to its parts, the whole disappears. Lichens challenge that.”
For Goward it goes further still: “It is still gobsmacking, the idea that lichens are a portal through which you look in one direction, and what you look at is the organism, and you turn around and what you see is the ecosystem, and they are a variation on the same thing.”
And so, Ms Mapes reminds us, are we — “existing both as individuals and as ecosystems, teeming with microbial life and pulsing with systems they largely control. Next time your gut isn’t happy, bow humbly to the microbes with which you share yourself.” Goward would have us reject the Anthropocene — which implies humans at the helm — for the Pandoracene. “A time of consequences.” The way forward, he says, is “an empathic relationship with the living world,” with lichens as “our ancient mentors in this, reliable truth tellers about how the world really works.”
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