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What's in a Lichen? How Scientists Got It Wrong for 150 Year

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techstepgenr8tion
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02 Aug 2018, 9:35 pm

Heh. I had no clue what was in a lichen. Interesting stuff, and glad this guy REALLY likes lichens.


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RESleight
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07 Oct 2018, 9:06 pm

fungus, fungus, alga :mrgreen:

Never knew that. Interesting video.



naturalplastic
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09 Oct 2018, 6:07 pm

But even that slightly incomplete discovery by the Victorians 150 years ago was radical for its time.

Scientists assumed that lichens were ,like every other organism they knew then , a single organism.

And they were confounded by lichens.

The first scientist to even suggest otherwise- to publish the suggestion that maybe lichens are a compound organism, and that they are a symbiotic combination of a plant and a fungus was....take a WILD guess who.

Hint: remember your childhood love for Peter Rabbit?

It was none other than Beatrix Potter. Now best known for those lovely children's books that she both wrote and illustrated.

Few today know that she also used her artistic talents to document stuff she saw through the microscope, and did pioneering work on studying fungi.



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22 Mar 2021, 9:16 pm

Yes. Interesting!


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Fnord
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23 Mar 2021, 8:22 am

Fungi were recently re-classified as neither plant nor animal, and lichens are classified by their fungal component; so it only makes sense that lichens are now being thoroughly re-investigated for re-classification.

Science was not specifically wrong about lichen, but the re-classification has illuminated some essential features that make it essential to more accurately classify lichen.  Science is self-correcting; but some corrections take longer than others.


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Fenn
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30 Mar 2021, 12:13 pm

Ok - I have always been confused if the word was pronounced "like-en" or "l-eye-chen" - so now I know.
My son did a study of coral - they are symbiotic too.
Some people think that the Mitochondria either are or once were symbiotic to humans and other animals - that was where George Lucas got his idea for the Midi-chlorians.


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kitesandtrainsandcats
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30 Mar 2021, 12:42 pm

Actually, the correct classification for lichen is, model railway scenery!
:D
https://www.walthers.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=lichen


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