TINY WINTER GARDENS: Lichen

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Lichen are everywhere.

That's part of their fun. You can find them in cities or the countryside - in your own backyard - and in any season or weather. Some look like paint splatters on trees and walls. They may be pale or darker shades of green. Some are yellow or almost white.
Up close, they might look like a tiny plate of lettuce, or crumbled dust, or miniature trees. In fact, the treelike ones are often sold, painted to look like trees, for model train setups!
Reindeer lichen has many branches, and, yes, reindeer do forage on it when there's little else to eat.
On a dry day, lichen are stiff and can be crumbled, but if it's foggy or raining, they are soft and strong.
Sometimes, more than one lichen will grow in the same place. The branching ones will tower over the leafy ones like a tiny garden.
Explore lichen habitats again when the warm weather comes. Red mites will scurry over the lichen and true spiders will hide under the 'flaps' of the leaflike lichen.

Leaflike lichen are "foliose." Crusty lichen are "crustose." Branching lichen are "fruticose."

Here is a flat leafy lichen.

This one has very fine branches.

Below is a crusty lichen with stalks.
The pink form is called 'pink earth' or 'birthday lichen.'
There is also a red tipped one called 'British Soldiers.'

This is rock tripe. It is thick and leathery when wet.

Lichen is a "symbiotic" lifeform. Two different things, a fungus and algae, have become one lifeform. The fungus (which is like mushroom fibers) protects the algae. (You see green algae slime floating on ponds in the summer.) The algae is a photosynthetic plant which can make it's own food from sunlight. In lichen, the algae shares its food with the fungus part of the plant.

Here is a photograph that shows the two parts of a lichen.
The round cells are algae.
The tough, stringy part is the fungus.

This is an electron micrograph.
It is a photograph of the lichen broken open and seen through an electron microscope.

Scans and EM of lichen by Kathyn H. Delisle.
Click here to see where some lichen live.