A CU Boulder workforce discovered new lichen species. They named them after the Indigo Girls

“You didn’t ask us the question everyone asks,” mentioned Erin Manzitto-Tripp. “What do lichen do?”

Manzitto-Tripp is an affiliate professor on the University of Colorado Boulder within the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She’s additionally the curator of botany on the faculty’s Museum of Natural History. But, before everything, she’s a lichenologist. 

“What do squirrels do?” she posited. “What do humans do? Lichens do a lot of things.”

Together with Ph.D. candidates Jacob Watts and Seth Raynor, Manzitto-Tripp is main the cost to doc Colorado’s huge lichen inhabitants. 

“The ratio is one lichenologist for 1000 botanists on earth,” she mentioned. “That just shows you what an enormous task we have.”

She’s a part of a workforce of three — the one three lichenologists within the state of Colorado. Together, they’re climbing hill and dale to catalog as most of the state’s species as potential.

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When her workforce started its analysis, there have been roughly 700 recognized lichen species in Colorado. When their analysis is full, they hope to have a log of over 2,000.

This summer time, they recognized three “charismatic” lichens and named them in honor of the Indigo Girls. 

What is a lichen?

Jacob Watts got here to CU Boulder to review vegetation. 

“Like many people in the United States, I didn’t really know what lichens were,” he mentioned.

But then he was given a hand lens, a tiny, moveable magnifying glass that can be utilized within the area, and checked out some lichen up shut.

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He mentioned it was “a magical experience” and he “instantly fell in love.”

On that day, he modified his course of research. He was to be a lichenologist. 

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Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite

“Lichens are actually a composite organism of a fungus and an alga that have come together to make a living,” Watts defined. “The fungus will give the alga a place to live in exchange for some of the sugars from photosynthesis that the alga produces. So it’s like a little house and then the algae forms a colony or lives inside the house.”

In different phrases: It’s a superorganism.

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They named three new lichens … however there are solely two members of the Indigo Girls. What’s up with that?

One lichen, Pertusaria rayana, is known as for Amy Ray. 

Another lichen, Lepraria saliersiae, is known as for Emily Saliers.

And the third lichen, Lecanora indigoana, is known as for the band itself.

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“What made us want to name these three new species after the Indigo Girls was simply to honor their careers,” Manzitto-Tripp mentioned. “Aside from their day job of writing and performing music, they have been lifelong activists, lifelong advocates for environmental health, ecological wellbeing, human rights, and honestly, the connectedness that happens between those two things.”

The trio reached out to the band’s administration to allow them to know, however haven’t heard something again.

“Which is fine,” Manzitto-Tripp mentioned. “Our intention was hopefully just to get this message to those ladies to say, ‘Thanks. We wanted to honor you.’”

“It’s frequently said, ‘You don’t want to meet your hero anyway,’” Manzitto-Tripp added. “So just to know that they maybe received word that they’d been honored in this way would be wonderful news.”

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A lichen by some other title would scent as candy

Lichonology is a labor of affection.

“We just want to know the names of things because names are the fundamental way we communicate about science, about knowledge,” Manzitto-Tripp mentioned. “How can we conserve and protect things if they don’t have names?”

So, she mentioned, it turns into her job to call them. Then, she has to be taught, “What are they doing? What are the ecologies? Where do they grow? What are their distributions? Who’s rare? Who’s common?”

All of this analysis is meant to construct a basis for the long run research of lichen. 

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“You go anywhere in the United States, and we take for granted that there are not one, two, but 20 different field guides,” Manzitto-Tripp mentioned. 

For instance, you possibly can go to Rocky Mountain National Park and see a wildflower and marvel, “What is that?” Then, you possibly can crack open a area information, doubtless obtainable within the Park’s reward store, and determine it. 

“You can’t do that with lichens almost anywhere in the world,” Manzitto-Tripp mentioned. “So our overarching objective here is simply to document the lichens of Colorado, comprehensively, for the first time ever in history.”

Then, she and her workforce hope to show that analysis into scholarly articles and a preferred area information.

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“It’s a really infectious feeling.”

Collecting lichen is difficult work.

“It’s a lot to carry around,” Manzitto-Tripp mentioned.

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“If you feel the weight of this macro lens, that plus rocks, hammers, chisels, all your collecting gear. It’s a lot to haul up and down mountains.”

“I think last summer I slept more nights in a tent than I did a bed,” Manzitto-Tripp mentioned, including that this summer time has been comparable.

In the sphere, the workforce has navigated surprising highway closures, inhospitable climate, and even an in depth encounter with a mountain lion. 

But their love of lichen is unstoppable.

“It’s a whole new world under the microscope,” Watts mentioned. “It’s just this magnificent feeling of, like, ‘Nobody’s ever seen this before.’”

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