Unassuming survivors: the partnership beneath the crust

Unassuming survivors: the partnership beneath the crust

To the casual walker, lichen is scenery's afterthought: a grey-green crust on a wall, a ragged beard on an old branch, a speckle of orange on a gravestone. It is rarely admired and almost never examined. Yet few organisms reward a closer look more generously, and fewer still have so thoroughly defied the categories that biologists devised for them.

A lichen is not one organism but a partnership. A fungus provides the structure, a protective body that holds water and anchors itself to its surface; within it live algae, cyanobacteria, or both, which capture sunlight and make sugars that the fungus could never produce for itself. When the idea was first proposed, in the 1860s, many of the specialists who heard it dismissed it as fanciful, and only gradually did the evidence accumulate that what looked like a single plant was, in fact, an alliance.

The bargain has made lichens remarkably resilient. Many can dry out almost completely and then revive within minutes of rainfall, a trick that lets them colonise bare rock, desert crusts and Arctic tundra, where little else can survive. The price of this toughness is speed, or rather the lack of it. Some crust-forming species expand by less than a millimetre a year, which means that a patch the size of a dinner plate may have been growing since long before the people now walking past it were born. Estimates of the age of the oldest specimens run to thousands of years, though such figures are inevitably approximate, since there is no equivalent of counting tree rings for a living crust.

Their sensitivity to air quality, by contrast, is anything but slow. Because lichens absorb water and dissolved substances directly through their surfaces, rather than through roots, they take up whatever is in the air as readily as they take up rain. Several species cannot tolerate sulphur dioxide, a pollutant once released in large quantities by burning coal, and they disappeared from industrial cities as the gas accumulated. Ecologists have since turned this vulnerability to advantage: by surveying which species grow on the trees of a given area, they can build a rough picture of the air's cleanliness without any specialised equipment. Where cities have cleaned up their emissions, lichens have begun, cautiously, to return.

It would be tempting to conclude from all this that lichens are fragile. The truth is subtler. They endure drought, frost and fierce sunlight with astonishing composure, yet they are undone by invisible chemistry. Researchers who study them speak less about rescue in any dramatic sense than about attention: a thriving lichen community is a quiet certificate of good air, and its absence is a quiet warning.

None of this makes lichens glamorous. But the next time you pass a wall mottled with grey and gold, it is worth pausing. What you are looking at is an old negotiation between very different kinds of life, conducted at a pace that makes our own concerns look hasty, and one that has been running, with remarkably few interruptions, for far longer than any city has stood.