lichen, The Last of Us + (some) musings

Babes and bots, 

Howdy! Anyone seen The Last of Us recently? I recommend stealing someone's HBO account info to watch it ASAP because let me tell you, this shit is wild. But let me come back to that...

lichen

So my partner and I went to Rocky Mountain National Park this weekend and looked at some stuff. Rocks, trees, fungus, frozen water, the like. We did a sexy 3.2 mi hike to Bridal Veil Falls and then turned around and walked back. I recommend spikes. 

So anyways, here we were on the top of the falls (because we just couldn't stop at the base) drinking bad beer and eating our lunch when we notice lichen, So much lichen. Lichen everywhere! And all different colors, too. 

Lichen is a composite species (i.e. it combines two other thingies to make one new thingie). Take fungi and algae and throw them together, boom lichen. Fungus makes the structure, and algae provide nutrition. The fungus offers a shelter for the algae to live outside of water. Some lichen looks like the tentacles inside of the mouths of weird zombie things in The Last of Us (fruticose lichen). Check out the mouth on that dude! 

And then there are other types of lichen. Foliose lichen is known for its leaf-like structures. 

Foliose lichen is very similar to squamulose lichen, which is crusty in the center and leafy at the tip. Squamulouse lichen is known for its scales (which look more like eyes to me).

And then there are crustose lichens that form a crust to the surface (often rock). 

Leprose lichen is powdery and often takes on a mustard hue. 

Filamentous lichen looks like hair (different from the Zombie tentacles). 

Gelatinous lichen is not layered by bacteria and fungi like other types of lichen. It is, instead, mixed together to create fuzzy petals (unlike foliose lichen because it is less grounded). 

 

And then we have byssoid lichen, which looks a bit like the fuzz on a rotten peach. 

And while I'm certainly no lichen expert (and probably got a few of these wrong), lichen is also just naturally hard to identify. There are slight differences in the cellular makeup of the fungus and algae--the combination that sticks depends entirely on the environment. However, lichen can grow anywhere between sea and alpine levels. In Antarctica, lichen's three queens are fruticose, crustose, and foliose (which just so happen to be the three most common lichen in Colorado, too). 

Lichens are like grey hairs. Some scientists have tried to use lichen to identify when glaciers melted, using that information to judge the age of an area. Lichen also helps speed up the aging process of rock such that dirt forms in decades, not centuries. 

Lichen is known as a natural colonizer, from the Latin "colonus" meaning inhabitant. In plants, colonization precedes primary succession and, sometimes, extinction. From the Rocky Mountain National Park page: 

Lichens have been nicknamed "nature's pioneer" because they can colonize bare rock and are usually first to establish on newly exposed surfaces.

I wonder what this means, "first to establish" or "newly exposed" in the history of colonization. OED tells us that colonist includes people, inhabitants, and plants, the latter two of which seem both separate and same depending on context. H.C. Watson, for example, defined colonists as, 

A weed of cultivated land or about houses, and seldom found except in places where the ground has been adapted for its production by the operations of man...

In discussing insects South of the equator, Darwin noted, 

The often-repeated description of the first colonists of the coral islets in the South Sea, is not, probably, quite correct: I fear it destroys the poetry of the story to find, that these little vile insects should thus take possession before the cocoa-nut tree and other noble plants have appeared.

And in 1876, a man named A.R. Wallace stated that, 

We may be sure that birds like the finches, which are profoundly modified and adapted to the special conditions of the climate and vegetation, are among the most ancient of the colonists. 

What I can't seem to find, though, is an oft-used definition of plants and animals as colonists before 1800. Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall (1609) was a dead end, though I am still searching. I wonder if the term "colonizer plant" has any relationship to human colonists who, in their travels across the globe, brought with them non-native plants, animals, and diseases. I also wonder how a mysterious brain fungus adapted to survive inside humans might be defined, and if that definition is, perhaps, a metaphor for zombie lore. Perhaps the bigger question I'm asking is how language informs knowledge, lived experience, and history. 

Thanks for taking a bite out of the sandwich with me! 

xoxo

BLT