How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology
Note: This post might not look very interesting. However, if you are interested in this a little, read the links thoroughly. It's way more interesting than it looks.Lichens have an important place in biology. In the 1860s, scientists thought that they were plants. But in 1868, a Swiss botanist named Simon Schwendener revealed that they're composite organisms, consisting of fungi that live in partnership with microscopic algae. This "dual hypothesis" was met with indignation: it went against the impetus to put living things in clear and discrete buckets. The backlash only collapsed when Schwendener and others, with good microscopes and careful hands, managed to tease the two partners apart.
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“It makes lichens all the more remarkable,” adds Nick Talbot from the University of Exeter. “We now see that they require two different kinds of fungi and an algal species. If the right combination meet together on a rock or twig, then a lichen will form, and this will result in the large and complex plant-like organisms that we see on trees and rocks very commonly. The mechanism by which this symbiotic association occurs is completely unknown and remains a real mystery.”
Read more at http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.ca/2016/08/how-guy-from-montana-trailer-park.html.
