By Susan Milius
From Mobile, Ala., at the Botany 2003 meeting
A lichen may have seemed complicated enough back in the good old days, when biologists described it as a partnership between a fungal and an algal species. Lichenologists are now debating even trickier arrangements, such as the stripes of Neuropogon.
This lichen genus shows up mostly in polar regions. The typical form grows light and dark bands. Biologists have theorized that the colors represent some fancy adaptation to changing light conditions, but Elfie Stocker-Wörgötter of the University of Salzburg in Austria proposes a quite different explanation. When she teased out bits from each band and grew them as individuals, they showed different forms and chemistry. The bands represent algae pairing with different fungal species, she contends, and DNA tests show they’re not even closely related fungi.