I have been having a really blah day, and so I needed a colorful lichen to brighten my mood. I am not sure it gets any brighter than L. silacea! This crustose lichen has a thick thallus of bright rusty-red or orange. It is cracked and tile-like, with black apothecia dotting the surface. It grows on acidic rock in arctic-alpine habitats in Europe, Greenland, and North America. Never let a bad day go by without reminding yourself that the world is full of adorable little lichens that look like squishy little piles of clay but are actually very hard and durable and will most likely outlast you on this godforsaken world. Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, isn’t L. silacea so cute???
Can you believe this little little gray spot is a lichen? It’s true. A. trolocularis is a foliicolous lichen, meaning it grows on the surface of long-lasting leaves.
A little inside peak into Lichenaday HQ–when I search for images of a lichen, a lot of times I get pictures like this:
This is a picture from a botanical collection (The New York Botanical Garden in this one) of a lichen specimen. And a lot of times, these pictures are not that great. Like in this picture, it is hard to know what you are supposed to be looking at because there’s a big, dry, dead leaf with a bunch of splotches on it. And believe it or not, this is one of the better ones I’ve seen! Because A. trilocularis, the subject hear, is kinda just a splotch on a leaf, and this was the only picture of it I could find that actually like, shows *the leaf.* For a lot of other lichens, once they are dried and aged, they don’t look like the living specimen at all, and the pictures are often from such a distance that you can’t tell what the F you are looking at. But those are the only pictures I find for lots of species. I avoid posting them because they are usually not great to look at and not super helpful for field ID purposes, but I thought I’d share this one so you get an idea of the substrate for this little splotchy fella.
