(click on photo to enlarge)"F" is for British Soldiers?
Whilst taking my "D" photo a couple of weeks ago, I discovered an interesting growth on the old timbers of the bridge upon which I was standing. I had never seen such before, and had not the faintest inkling of what I was observing. I took my camera, with photos, to my gardening daughter's home and we looked it up in her Fungus book (she has a book for just about every sort of thing one might encounter in the great outdoors.) Turns out that what I had on my camera card was a lichen named British Soldiers. A quick Google search revealed the following:
"British Soldiers is a lichen which gets its name from its resemblance to the uniforms worn by English soldiers during the Revolutionary War. A lichen is not just one organism, but a fungus and algae living together to form a new organism.
The fungus in British Soldiers is called Cladonia cristatella. The algae is known as Trebouxia erici. Because lichens take the name of the fungus part of the relationship, British Soldiers is also known as Cladonia cristatella." - The above information taken from the Fairfax County (VA) Public Schools web site. More information on British Soldiers can be found here.
This fungus/algae combination is really tiny. I estimate that the longest of the growths shown in my photo were about an inch long.
ABC Wednesday was created by Mrs. Nesbitt. Please visit the ABC Wednesday site to view others' interpretations of this week's letter, "F."
