What are lichens? Detailed answer

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What are lichens? Detailed answer

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What are lichens?

Lichens are plants without roots, leaves or flowers. Despite the latter circumstance, some of them have a rather attractive appearance. The color of lichens varies from light gray or whitish to bright green.

Lichens grow almost everywhere on our planet, and the list of their species includes about 16 names. They can be found in sun-scorched deserts and on the bare rocks of Antarctica. They adapt to life in any conditions: abandoned lands, stones, poor soil, dead trees, tree bark. They are not afraid of neither heat, nor cold, nor dampness, nor an arid climate. Almost the only place where they do not meet are cities: harmful dust, smoke from factory chimneys and other "charms" of city life turn out to be disastrous for them!

In fact, any lichen is not one, but two plants, which, however, form a single living organism. One of these plants is a fungus and the other is an algae. Most of the lichen is a grayish filamentous fungus, between the fibers of which are green algae cells.

Algae, being a green plant, can produce food for itself, while a non-green fungus cannot. Therefore, the "mushroom" part of the lichen feeds on algae, and that, in turn, uses the moisture absorbed from the environment by the fungus, which also provides it with shelter from adverse conditions.

Such a relationship between living organisms, when each of them benefits from the strengths of the other, is called symbiosis, which in Greek means "coexistence."

Lichens grow very slowly, but live quite a long time. Some of the lichen colonies known to scientists have existed for about two thousand years! Some species of lichen reproduce by spores, but most still do this with the help of small pieces of adult plants carried by wind or animals to new habitats, or special processes that easily break off from the mother stem.

Lichens are the very first among plants to appear on absolutely bare rocks. Then, very slowly, but inevitably, they begin to destroy the surface layer of the rock, turning it into stony dust. It is she, together with dead and decaying lichens, that forms the first thin layer of soil, on which other plants gradually begin to settle down.

Author: Likum A.

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