The Fuzzy Ruckus: The Power of Lichen
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All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. See? Yeah. Three, two, one. Imagine you're slowing way, way down and your body is turning strange colors. Bright safety cone orange or a toothpaste green.

And as you slowly spread over a rock, you're eating the rock and you might be being nibbled by a caribou. You have become a lichen. All right, now is the part where I make you sing the theme song with me. Terrestrials, terrestrials, we are not the worst, we are the

My brain is gone. We're not the worst. We're the best. Best Reels. Oh, you got it. Okay. Terrestrials is a show where we uncover the strangeness waiting right here on Earth. I am your host, Leeloo Miller, joined as always by my song bug, Alan. Like it, love it, want some more of it. In this season, we are looking at creatures that are usually...

And today's lichen lover is... Ashley Eliza Williams. And I am an artist... Who paints... Lichens. I'm obsessed with lichens. ♪

Now, even if you don't think you've ever seen lichen, you probably have. It's that often green or yellow fuzz that grows up trees or on top of rocks. I honestly used to think it was a kind of mold. I mean, some people think they look like something has gone wrong and they try to power wash them off things. I mean, I get that. It looks kind of scuzzy. But when you get up close, lichens are...

Extremely beautiful. And Ashley knows this because when she walks through the forest, she wears a necklace with a special charm at the end called... A loop. It's a little magnifying glass. And when I look at lichens really closely under this magnifying glass, she sees...

a different world. Some of them look like antlers, fuzzy little reindeer antlers branching in all directions. Some of them kind of look like sea creatures or bubbles and cups. Some look like tiny heads of lettuce with tons of wrinkly leaves. And then when you look inside the wrinkles, there are even more wrinkles.

And the deeper she looked into lichen, the more she saw not only textures, but messages. Messages that could help humans trying to heal the earth. And one very special message that would help her overcome a fear she'd been carrying since childhood. Yes. All right. So our story starts millions of years ago when the earth's land was much more barren. Mostly a lot of rocks.

And at some point, lichen shows up and begins spreading and chomping its way all over those rocks. And as it chomped, it helped turn the rocks into soil, which made a nice cozy place for trees and other plants to take root and grow. And slowly, the lichen spread farther and farther all over the planet to every corner in almost every imaginable color,

And one day in 1985, a little baby girl is born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The thing is, there were lichens all around, but I didn't really notice them. Ashley was outside a ton as a kid. There was a creek behind my elementary school, and I liked looking for all the little fishes and the bugs, the water bugs. I was fascinated by the water bugs.

And even though there were lichens right under her nose. They were invisible to me. Now, part of the reason Ashley spent so much time in nature was that being around humans in big groups at school or parties was really hard. I was an incredibly shy kid. So I didn't really speak much, or really at all. I didn't speak at all for a couple years in school. At all? Yeah. I so badly wanted to connect to other people.

But for some reason, I couldn't quite do it. It was too scary to kind of say a word. And I remember kids kind of asking me to speak or telling me to speak. And I remember feeling kind of paralyzed, like I actually couldn't speak.

She said she'd blush and the kids would sometimes start laughing. Oh, it was terrible. I hated it. I was so embarrassed. So Ashley started avoiding people as much as she could. I spent a lot of time by myself, reading and spending time in the woods. And because I wasn't talking very much, I became really curious about quiet beings.

Like snails or ferns or those water bugs rippling the water. Creatures that are quiet and maybe easily overlooked. She would stare at their movements and colors and try to understand them. That's probably why I became an artist. Because painting and making art is a kind of way to communicate without words. ♪

So Ashley painted and she drew creatures of the forest and when she grew up she landed a dream job teaching art at Colorado State University.

Only problem, because teaching means talking in front of big groups of students. I was a wreck before every single class. So to calm her nerves, she'd go for runs through the mountains before class, just as the sun was coming up. The light would change and the rocks would turn different colors. And she decided she wanted to paint a portrait of one of those rocks. But...

As she started looking really closely at it, I realized there were little creatures growing on the rock. Lichens! She was noticing lichens for the first time. They were all different colors, bright yellow and tangerine orange and strange blue-green. And she thought, forget the rocks, I want to paint these. And as she painted more and more of their wild shapes, she began to wonder who they were.

She couldn't tell, were they mushrooms? Were they plants? And we'll get back to that. But the thing that really amazed her as she started to research them was just how much they could do. Because it turned out lichen don't just live on rocks and trees. They live on metal, they live on statues and gravestones, even on the backs of bugs. What? Yes. Kind of bobbing along as it goes, just catching a ride? Yes, yes.

They can also live in the freezing cold. In the far Arctic, under lots and lots of snow. Or the burning hot. In the desert. Or right after a volcano erupts. Huge explosion. After the lava rolls through. Some of the first creatures to arrive are lichens. They can even live unmoored. In the wind.

And because of all this, many species of lichen are what's known as extremophiles. Extremophiles, creatures that are going to the extreme, living in an extreme environment and for an extremely long time. The oldest lichen, I believe, is 9,000 years old. Oh my God. I'm authentically choking up my water. What?

Wow. I was shocked too. Yeah. 9,000 years old in Sweden. Imagine being that old. Those lichens have seen a lot of things. The building of the pyramids, the invention of the wheel, woolly mammoths. And because they've been around for so long, they contain messages. Messages they've recorded about the past.

So if you were to look out at a field of lichen with a trained eye, you could tell when there was a flood or a fire or someone trespassing. And so lichens are used by historians and forest rangers and even detectives. Lichens can help us solve crimes.

She's not kidding. Lichens have been used in court cases. And they can also tell us about things we can't see with our own eyes. The color of a lichen will change in areas with worse air pollution. So like you wouldn't even need some fancy device. You could just go walk around in a forest and see like it is healthy here. Yeah.

- Yeah! - It is dangerous here. - Yeah, neat. - They are like these understated superheroes that can do all sorts of things that almost no other plant or animal on Earth can do.

Which got me wondering, how are they able, like, what do you think the source of their superpower is? Like, just the fact that they can last so long, they can live on sand, they can live after lava, they can live in the air, they can live under snow. Like, what is their power? Where does it come from? Um, well, Ashley has the answer. And she'll tell us right after a short break. ♪♪♪

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And Terrestrials listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when they sign up today at ixl.com slash terrestrials. Visit ixl.com slash terrestrials to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. Terrestrials is back. We are in Maine. And we of the Northwoods are on a hunt. Man, it's just basically snowy everywhere. A lichen hunt.

with artist Ashley Eliza Williams. So I'm crouching down and I'm going to dig into the snow and see if I can find some lichens. We've just come across some boulders covered in about six inches of snow. All right, I'm dusting the snow off the surface. And peeking out from under the white, fluffy snow. I see a lichen! Extremely bright, kind of tangerine-colored lichens. And it's living under here, under the snow.

So the question we left off with was how? How is lichen so boss? How can it survive in such extreme places like under this snow where very few other things can live? And get ready because the answer might scramble your brain a bit, might shatter a hard line you thought existed in nature. Because remember how Ashley couldn't tell at first if lichens were plants or mushrooms?

Well, it turns out... They're not a plant. And they're not a mushroom. They are a plant and a mushroom. It's a plant and a fungi together. Together. Lichen is what's called a composite organism. One organism made up of two or more species. So when Ashley looks close at one splotch of lichen growing off of a rock, the thing she is looking at...

It's not one thing. It's actually not an organism. It's a relationship. Wait, the matter that we're seeing, these wild shapes and cups and antlers, like that is a relationship in physical form? Yes. It's a strange idea, but here's what she means. When you look at lichen under a microscope, it looks a little like a hug.

The mushroom, or the fungi, is given a big hug, totally surrounding the plant part called algae.

They're kind of fitting into each other like puzzle pieces. What goes on in this hug allows lichen to do incredible things because the fungus gives the lichen fungi powers. It can sip water from the air and minerals from the soil and provide shelter for that soft algae center. The fungus kind of protects the algae? The algae, yes.

Well, that gives the lichen plant powers. That lets it do the incredible, magical-seeming trick of using sunlight to turn air into sugar. Ta-da! And that hug is the secret to how lichen can handle so many extreme environments, Arctic tundra, deserts, lava fields, even air itself. Lichen can find a way to get the food and strength it needs because of the multiple species it

That it is. They're a community. Which was such a strange idea. To be a bunch of different beings all squished together. That when scientists first suggested that's what was going on inside lichen, people just didn't believe it. It totally upended everything we know about what we think of as an organism.

This was back in 1869, about a decade after Charles Darwin published his big book on the origin of species, which talked about how creatures compete with one another to survive. And many people took that to mean that to succeed at life, you had to compete.

It's a doggy dog world out there. Do you want to win? Uh, yeah. I said, do you want to win? Yeah! Survival of the fittest! Now get out there and crush the competition! And then along comes this scientist who said, wait, look at what's going on inside lichen. These two different species are working together.

It seemed bonkers to a lot of scientists at first. But the more they looked under microscopes at lichen, the more they saw the truth inside. These two different species working together to become one organism.

They even had to invent a whole new word just to describe it. The word symbiosis actually came from scientists studying lichens. Sym meaning together and bio meaning life. Working together to live. Symbiosis. And what is wild is that that hug inside of lichen, well, if you zoom out, you can see how it extends to all kinds of creatures outside of it.

In the Arctic, for example, because lichen can survive in the freezing snow throughout the winter, then so can caribou and reindeer nibbling up lichen until spring. Or in the deserts of Libya, lichen growing on hot rocks helps sheep survive through dry spells.

Or on the snowy foothills near Mount Everest, there is somebody else finding crucial nourishment from lichen. I'm on page 42. This is Prashant Kanal, flipping through a cookbook he wrote of recipes from Nepal where he lives. Garlic cloves, ginger, one onion, and a handful of lichen. This is a recipe for a lichen curry called the Yangban Faksa.

Now, some lichen is poisonous, so don't go around tasting it. But Prashant explained that in the eastern region of Nepal, there grows a lichen that is totally safe to eat. And in the generations that the Limbu people have been living on those often snowy hillsides, lichen became an essential food. Yeah, yeah. And a tasty one, too. I've never seen anyone who has tried lichen and they didn't like it. Everyone is lichen, lichen.

That's a good one. And when Prashant learned that lichen helped his ancestors, well, it changed how the lichen curry tasted to him. Food tastes better if you know the history. It changes the experience. And somehow the food becomes even tastier. And back to our shy artist, Ashley. When she learned that lichen was actually a community of species helping one another...

It made her question something that she had believed for a long time. You know, for a long time thought I maybe didn't need people. She had the woods, the quiet. But looking closely at Lycan...

started to change her. The fact that Likens are stronger because they're a community is something that's really stayed with me. And as I've gotten older, I realized that I very much need people. I very much need a community. Scary as crowds can be, she started to believe that there could be people inside them who could support her, inspire her, make her laugh, or, you know, help her survive.

Likens show us that we need each other. So she started pushing through her fears and attending concerts, lectures by scientists, art openings, and even going to the grocery store when it was busy instead of 6 a.m. when no one would be there. Yeah. And even though it often terrified her to do these things... I have met some of the most fascinating people on the planet. Yeah.

including a certain someone named... Uh, Jason. A scientist with spiky black hair and kind brown eyes. And one spring day, he asked Ashley if she wanted to go on a date. Were you nervous? Oh my goodness, I was incredibly shy with him. But Jason didn't seem to mind that Ashley was quiet.

They went to an art museum and stood shoulder to shoulder. Looking quietly. And carefully at all kinds of art. And he was able to do that, and I was really impressed by that. She was also impressed by what kind of science he did. One of the things that drew me to him is that he...

Shy galaxies. Shy galaxies? Like in outer space? Yes. Wait, what does that mean? So when you think of a galaxy, you might think of these, you know, galaxies with bright spiral arms. Flashing, lots going on. Flashing. They're showy. Okay, they're flashy. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Literally flashy. Okay. Yes. But he is interested in...

The galaxies that not many people care about. The little quiet galaxies that don't make very much light. In other words, they're kind of like the lichen of space. The lichen of space. Yeah, he's looking at these little smudges in the sky that are really easy to overlook. While I'm kind of crouched down on the ground looking at these tiny little lichens that are also overlooked. And I think that's really romantic.

Aw. I do too. Well, here's to likens of all kinds. Oh no. Songbud's got a famous punk star with him, Laura Jane Grace. Woo! And they've both got electric guitars. Whether you're algae, fungus, we're gonna make a fuzzy ruckus. I'm not liking what you're liking. You're liking. Come sip my algae and a fungus.

We're gonna make a Fuzzy Rock Yes! I eat raw! We're gonna synthesize! It's hard to believe! What's going on? The coldest cold, the hottest sun, anybody throws at us! Oh, out together better than alone, we grow together better than alone! We thrive united, not apart, we face the day together all alone! Oh, together better than alone, we grow together better than alone!

Whether you're algae or you're fungus Gonna make a fuzzy ruckus

Together we are stronger than ever. Alan Kavinsky and Laura Jane Grace, everybody. Woo! Yeah. And that's it. That is the end of Terrestrials. There is nothing else cool about to happen. What's that? Excuse me, I have a question. Me too. Me three. Me four. The Badgers. Listeners, the badgering questions for the expert. Are you ready? Yes.

I'm Alma, and I'm six, and I'm almost turning seven. Are all lichens okay to eat, or are some dangerous? Okay, so they're eaten in all kinds of different cultures, including Nepal, as we already learned, and also in India, where they're in a popular spice called garam masala. Oh!

Garam masala, I have that in my spice rack right now, so there's lichen in my kitchen right now. Yeah. But reminder, many in the wild are poisonous, so don't go licking lichen.

Hi, my name is Rosalind Chow. I'm an actor from Star Trek. Could lichens survive on the moon? They've actually put lichens into space. Wait, like shot them up in a rocket ship? Yes, yes, they did. And then like let them out the door? Yes. And they go dormant out in outer space. But when they bring them back to Earth...

they can revive them and they're still alive. We could not do that. No, we could not do that. And very few other beings on Earth could do that. But lichens can do that. Hi, my name is Niren. I'm seven years old. My question is, are lichens half-dead creatures?

Nope. So they're actually double alive because they are fungus and an algae. And actually maybe triple alive because they're also bacteria. Wow. So wait, the community just went from two to maybe three, maybe four, maybe five and beyond? Every time a new paper comes out or more information comes out about lichens, we're learning that they're made of more beings. So the community just keeps getting bigger and more complex. Wow. Wow. All right. All right.

I'm going to leave it there, but one last question, a question for you, listener. If you had to team up with another species, which one would it be? Let us know your answer. Shoot us an email or a drawing at T-E-R-R-E-S-T-R-I-A-L-S-W-N-Y-C dot org. Ew.

Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu Miller, with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Brenna Farrell, Mira Burtwin-Tonick, Alan Gufinski, Tanya Chawla, Ana Gonzalez, Sarah Sambach, Joe Plord, Valentina Powers, and me. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Calliopeia Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation. Thank you!

Also, huge shout out to our advisors for this season of Terrestrials. Ana Luz Porzikonski, Princess Johnson, Anil Lewis, Tara Welty, Liza Steinberg-Demby, Andy J. Pizza, Sophie Miller, and Dominique Shabazz. We could not have made this without you. Special thanks to Sia Sharma Gaines, Niran Bhatsharp, Scott LaGreca, Sarita Bhat,

And you for listening. If you like our strange little show about the earth and the creatures on it with the occasional singing, please rate and review us and share it with your friends. It really does make a huge difference. See you in a couple spins of this dirty old planet of ours.

What are you doing? Oh, I'm making a lichen curry from Pashanta's cookbook. Wait, where'd you find the recipe? Well, I subscribed to the Terrestrials newsletter, of course, and I got some recipes, resources, worksheets, music from Terrestrials, which you wrote the whole shebang in my inbox just for signing up with this brand new newsletter. Link in the show notes or at terrestrialspodcast.org. Ba-da-doom!