S'more Lichens

[Ken Ramos]

It has been a very cool and rainy day here in Western North Carolina. The cool winds of autumn are upon us and they feel so good. Reminds me of days spent in my younger years of roaming the foothills of East Tennessee, a young boy with an old coffee can and a magnifying glass, looking for something or another to bring home for an evenings study at the microscope and every now and then looking out of my bedroom window at an orange glowing moon rising above the mountain tops in the distant eastern sky. I had a lot of curiosity back then and the world was a vast mystery waiting to be solved. Even back then lichens and fungi were a deep mystery and I would comb the cracks and crevices of everything I came across to unvail the msyteries which they held.



I bearly know the names of most lichens that I find but their beauty is ever changing, especailly after a cool autumn rain. The colors of them become richer in appearance and they stand out among the tree limbs that they grow on. I never had a steromicroscope back when I was a kid, in fact I had never heard of such a thing, only the high powered compounds was I familar with. Too bad now that I think about it. So much can be seen with one of these, the stereomicroscope that is.



Meiji EMZ-13TR Stereomicroscope w/Sony DSC-W5
Illumination: Micro Lite FV 1000 fluorescent ring light

These are the apothecia of a foliose lichen as they appear on the lichen body or thallus, the rich green areas in the center is the hymenium. This is the fertile area from which the spores of the fungi are produced.

[beetleman]

Great photos Ken. Are these all the same Lichen? Your passion for lichen is showing in your pictures. The second picture with the apothecia is especially beautiful, I love that color!! I remember having a black compound microscope (probably a tasco) and staying up till the wee hours of the night looking at stuff I raised in a jar with dried grass and water and the snack dishes I Left under the bed for a few days (well, maybe more than a few days) I want to find some of those red and yellow lichen

[Ken Ramos]

They are all the same Doug, with the exception of the top left image. The apothecia is smaller and it is round. I am going to have to purchase a book with some detailed photographs if I am ever going to be able to identify these things. The only other way to identify them is by spore and chemical analysis. Why I did not stay with my myxomycetes? They were much easier to ID by their spores alone but you really have to crank up the magnifications to a 1000X to ID them.

Sue, I think, has one of the first little microscopes that I had the pleasure to own back when I was a kid. It was a Stellar I believe, only about 6" or so high but it had glass lenses and at the time was my pride and joy. Then my folks bought me a Tasco microscope for Christmas one year and I was amazed at how well it worked. I do not believe Tasco makes them any more or makes them to the standards that they did back in the 60's. I seen one at a dept. store a long time ago and it was quite small and very cheaply made, a toy in other words.

Thanks Doug.

[Cyclops]

Excellent photos of these most interesting 'plants'