The 10th issue of It’s Freezing in LA!’s central theme is Plants. Research and digital images of lichen has been included in an infographic page spread.
At odds with IFLA! 10’s theme, lichen are not plants, rather they are often found accompanying them. Like plants, and any organism for that matter, lichen appear to be singular. Yet studying lichen under a microscope reveals two composite parts: fungus, and algae (or cyanobracteria)
from which plants first evolved. Photosynthesising cells are entangled with fungal filaments. The symbiosis that forms a lichen suggests that ‘organisms’ are blurrier than previously presumed.
Consider our own relationships, as ‘individual’ humans, with the various beings that form our ‘microbiomes’ (from gut bacteria to yeasts) – studies suggest that cells with human DNA only constitute 43% of the body’s total. Given our own symbiotic relationships with microbiomes, plants, other people, and lichens themselves, it’s difficult to dispute that we too are blurry-boundaried organisms connected to a wide array of life diffused both within and without us. In this way, symbiotic lichen remind us to honour those connections.
