What's in a Lichen? How Scientists Got It Wrong for 150 Years | Short Film Showcase

My favorite thing about lichens is that they're always out there. So anytime you go on a walk and go on a bike, go float the river, you can go out and collect. Like, it's into a winter when you're skiing. You only see lichens; so like, until they cover about seven percent of the Earth's surface, Trustee, like in this big leafy macro lichens, hair lichens, big huge lichens.

Some lichens that grow really fast can grow up to three feet a year, and you got ones that grow really slowly and live for ten thousand years. As a photographer, when I'm out there poking around, I just see colors. I see shapes. I've got over 16,000 collections of lichens here currently, studio photography set up, where I can go out and collect lichen samples and bring them back to the lab here and set them up and control the lighting.

So historically, a lichen was assumed to be a union between a single species of fungus and the species of green algae. But when they come together, they form this unique structure unlike the two individuals. The algae photosynthesizes, and the fungus produces the structure. Those two come together, and they live in places where the individual parts alone couldn't. That's what we thought of lichens for the last hundred fifty years.

The study was accepted in Science magazine, and Toby, the main author, approached me and asked if I would do a photo for the cover. [Music] This person, Toby Spray Bella, walks in. I don't know what he said. "Hi, I'm Toby. I work on lichens. Please sit down."

So Toby brought me this problem. He said, "Look, these two lichens that were clearly different, but when we look at their genes, they were exactly the same." Native Americans used the edible horsehair lichen, that brown stuff hanging from trees, and essentially made little cliff flowers. They knew that one was yellow because it contained an acid called volcanic acid, and they knew that that was toxic.

We sort of left with this problem of they are different, but we don't see it. So what is it that's the problem? We were stuck thinking about this idea of one fungus, one algae, which is how it's taught in textbooks. It was totally wrong. It was absolutely wrong. But what we found was that there was a third layer, a separate distantly related fungi that was an integral part of the symbiosis. [Music]

It took us realizing that to change how we thought about the symbiosis in general. We looked for this additional partner on six different continents, and in every case, we were finding it. It started as a small project in Montana between a couple of people with different backgrounds and ended up as this global endeavor.

So without the whole group working together, we never would have been able to study the organisms that have to work together. Sometimes big discoveries can come from really simple questions. It's a good reminder to keep an open mind. You [Music] you.