Can you eat lichen?
Many animals eat lichen, including snails, voles, squirrels and snub-nosed monkeys. In winter, they are an important source of food for reindeer, which avoid the ones containing poisonous cyanobacteria.
A large number of related lichen species that the reindeer and caribou eat are known, depending on which continent they inhabit, as reindeer lichens or caribou lichens. Cladina stellaris is the most heavily eaten species.Caribou prefers eating lichen because it is very healthy. Musk-oxen live in the frozen Arctic and roam the tundra in search of the roots, mosses, and lichens that sustain them.
Humans sometimes eat lichens too, and some species are used in Asian traditional medicines.
Only a few lichens are truly poisonous, with species of Letharia and Vulpicida being the primary examples. These lichens are yellow because they have high concentrations of the bright yellow toxin vulpinic acid. Wolf lichen (Letharia vulpina) was used in Scandinavia to poison wolves.
A large number of related lichen species that the reindeer and caribou eat are known, depending on which continent they inhabit, as reindeer lichens or caribou lichens. Cladina stellaris is the most heavily eaten species.Caribou prefers eating lichen because it is very healthy. Musk-oxen live in the frozen Arctic and roam the tundra in search of the roots, mosses, and lichens that sustain them.
Humans sometimes eat lichens too, and some species are used in Asian traditional medicines.Only a few lichens are truly poisonous, with species of Letharia and Vulpicida being the primary examples. These lichens are yellow because they have high concentrations of the bright yellow toxin vulpinic acid. Wolf lichen (Letharia vulpina) was used in Scandinavia to poison wolves.
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