I Like Lichens

It being such a mizzling day, I needed some color. Luckily, this kind of weather brings out the vibrancy of the lichens on our street trees.Air pollution is generally bad news for lichens, as is ozone depletion. Walking through City Hall Park in Manhattan just before I took these shots on Union Street in Brooklyn, I noticed extremely little lichen on the mature trees in the Inner Borough. Brooklyn seems to have a more lichen-friendly atmosphere, although not for lack of cars.As you may remember from school science, lichen is a composite organism in which a fungus and an alga or a bacterium work together symbiotically. Except for the atmospheric issues, lichen can be found in some of the harshest environments on the planet.

(The actual near-fluorescence of this lichen on dark wet bark is hard to capture. In the last shot, I used the flash.)