British Soldier Lichen
Cladonia cristatella
British Soldier Lichen · New Hampshire · 10 October 2020
British Soldier Lichen on a rotting stump in the White Mountains, an inch tall at most. It is an American lichen, not a British one, found on poor ground across eastern North America and nowhere in Britain. The name was given by the colonists, for the red coats of the soldiers they had just fought, and it stuck.
A lichen is not one organism. It is a fungus farming an alga: the fungus provides structure, anchorage and water, the alga photosynthesises and feeds them both. Neither lives that way alone. The red tips are the fungal fruiting bodies, the only part of the partnership that reproduces sexually. They grow perhaps a millimetre a year, on poor ground nothing else wants.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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