Lichen can look kind of innocuous in their simple flat shapes, like discolorations in the stone or fallen leaves of some sort. But this ancient life form is both a single organism and a hybrid collaboration between a fungus and a cyanobacteria. In 1877, German botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary created the word “symbiosis” to define this interspecies union of a “mycobiant” that anchors the Round to a surface and extracts trace mineral nutrients from the environment, and a “photobiant” that creates food using photosynthesis. That two very different things would form mutually beneficial relationships was a radial scientific idea at the time. We could learn something from lichen.

09.05.26