A phone call to the Pentagon to talk about lichens gets a better response than one might expect. There’s no deputy assistant undersecretary for fungal/algal composite organisms, but the Air Force does keep a botanist at headquarters. And yes, part of his job is to attend to military-base lichens.
One of his subjects is Cladonia perforata, as close as the lichen world gets to having a celebrity.
These handfuls of yellow-gray branchings adapted to life on sand dunes earned the dubious honor in 1989 of becoming the first lichen proposed for the U.S. endangered species list.
Log in
Subscribers, enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions.