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EXPEDITIONS 



~* See preceding two pages 



THE NATURAL EXPLANATION BY ERIN ESPELIE 



f you've been on a hike in ^d&SM 



New England in the last ;lJv>> ; 

 thirty-five years and have 

 noticed a couple "hiking" 

 on their hands and knees, 

 you may have spied pho- 

 tographer Patricia Hinds 

 and her husband James. 

 "Crawling," explains 

 James, "is a much better 

 way to see soil lichens 

 than walking." 



Down on the ground is 

 just one place to prospect 

 for lichens. Those sym- 

 biotic organisms — fungi 

 outfitted with a solar panel 

 of algae — can pioneer a 

 plethora of habitats, from deserts 

 to old cars. They can even tolerate 

 outer space, as shuttle experiments 

 in 2005 proved. The Hinds were 

 on their feet when they found the 

 lichens pictured on the previous 

 two pages. Thriving on a spruce 

 branch above a rocky shore of 

 Schoodic Point, Maine, were pin- 

 cushion sunburst (orange), fringed 

 coastal rosette (gray with black 

 "hair"), and salted shield (gray 

 with white marks). Those three 

 lichens join 458 of their New Eng- 

 land kin in a comprehensive new 

 book coauthored by the Hinds. 



Some people consider lichens to 

 be a nuisance, unsightly and 

 destructive. Witness the scrub- 

 bing given to Mount Rushmore a 

 few years ago — an attempt to halt 

 the supposed weathering effects 

 of lichen. But when lichens were 

 scraped off Cambodia's Angkor 

 Wat twenty years ago, one lesson 



Lichens, clockwise from top left: wall lichen, 

 red-fruited pixie-cups, lungwort, pink earth 



learned (too late) was that, at least 

 to some extent, the lichens had 

 protected the temple's stone carvings 

 from heat and water damage. 



In any case, lichens do provide 

 clear benefits from a human point 

 of view — antibiotic synthesis and 

 dye making, to name just two. 

 Caribou and reindeer depend on 

 lichens for food, and many birds 

 use lichens to build their nests. Re- 

 cently, a land snail in the Canary 

 Islands was discovered to camou- 

 flage itself by gluing thick coats of 

 lichen on its shell. 



As hardy and widespread as they 

 are, though, lichens cannot toler- 

 ate one thing: air pollution. That 

 might begin to explain why the 

 Hinds deem 257 of the lichen spe- 

 cies they have documented to be 

 rare or in decline in New England. 

 So add air-quality alarm as another 

 reason why you might want to 

 think twice before chipping those 

 lichens off your garden gnome. 



■■■■^■■■■1 



Patricia L. Hinds took all but three of the 400-plus photographs 

 in The Macrolichens of Neu> England (The New York Botanical 

 Garden Press, 2007). James W. Hinds researched and wrote 

 the book's text, having followed his wife's lead in the study of 

 lichens. Earlier in their careers they were researchers in neuro- 

 anatomy. The couple have lived m Orono, Maine, since 1983. 



4 natural history October 2008 



