Lichens may be the most easily overlooked life forms in nature. If you spend much time outside, you probably see some every day, although you might not know it—most people are likely to think they’re moss. However, lichens aren’t plants (which mosses are), but rather fungi that team up with algae and/or cyanobacteria to form a kind of composite organism. Although they rank relatively low on the biological charisma scale, lichens play important roles in ecological communities, from carbon uptake to food for a variety of animals, and they’re the quintessential example of symbiosis—a partnership between two separate organisms—and were even the subject of research that first proposed the concept of symbiosis in the late 1800s.
Click here for original story, Study reveals how lichens stayed together, split up, swapped partners, and changed form over 250 million years
Source: Phys.org