Ah, yes. Here we have a species of beard lichen, genus Usnea.
I’ll be honest with you: this stuff confuses the holy/wholly hell out of me. It’s an organism that is actually a comprised of a symbiotic relationship between two other organisms — one a fungus and the other an algae.
Hey, I’m down-deputy-dog when you have one organism symbiotically living with (or inside) another organism — but this organism –beard lichen– is apparently defined by the relationship of the other two. When that happens, Janson gets dizzy and is reminded of that time in 1983 when somebody explained to him that a portugese man o war is a gosh darn colony of polyps or zooids or whatever — and not actually a jellyfish. It took Young Janson about three years to recover from the man o war paradigm shift of realization. Later in my life, much later, dinosaurs sprouted feathers, girls became cool, and scientists killed Pluto. Life is, at best, unpredictable from the narrow point of view of relative ignorance.
So, anyhow, this beard lichen –as much as I can understand it– is comprised of fungi and alga, but is considered (and classified) as a single organism (genus Usnea). Taxonomically, it’s generally classified under kingdom Fungi.
Alright. That’s cool.
With well over five-hundred species of Usnea draping the trees of the world, I’m just going to leave the classification for this one at the genus level. If I’m really lucky, a lichen-master will stumble across the blog and make sense of this madness!
~ janson
