Lichen comic strips





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Why do lichen grow on trees?

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Lichens  on  trees  are a unique organism because they are actually a symbiotic relationship between two organisms — fungus and algae. The fungus  grows  on the  tree  and can collect moisture, which the algae needs. The algae, in return, can create food from the energy of the sun, which feeds the fungus. Lichen on tree bark is completely harmless to the tree itself. The rhizines (similar to roots) allow them to attach to the tree but do not go deep enough to harm the tree in any way. Many people believe when a tree becomes sick and has lichen, that the lichens are the cause of the illness. This is impossible and most likely the lichen was there long before the tree became ill.
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Can you eat lichen?

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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
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