Cladonia Asahinae

Together with participants of MaDonna Mädchentreff, I created the rainwater harvester “Cladonia Asahinae” that you can find at Umweltbildungswiese. I´ll tell you how it came about. We find ourselves in the future, in the year 2250: 

The Symbiocene epoch is the era of humanity reconnecting to nature, reverting from the patterns of dominance in the previous Anthropocene epoch and changing their behaviours to allow space for co-habitation with all earthly beings. As we know, it hasn’t been a smooth ride, and there have been strange twists on the road to symbiosis, including the organism we see here. The enhanced CO2 concentration of our atmosphere due to human industrial activity motivated early attempts at 22nd century bioengineering. The early bioengineers aimed to create organisms that could survive in and stabilize the new environment. One lesser-known example is the Cladonia Asahinae, the Pixie Cup Lichen, which once grew at a miniature scale, ranging from mere millimeters to max. Two centimeters in height. Due to experiments by Symbiocene scientists in the 2250’s, Pixie Cup Lichen now grows at the scale we recognize today, reaching heights of half a meter to approximately three meters. The rapid growth of these bush-sized lichen was key to their use in managing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, while their unique shape allowed them to fill their original ecological niche on a larger scale. The bowl-shaped tops of these lichen are a natural rainwater collector. Instead of tiny microbes, insects and birds now rely on these reservoirs to keep themselves hydrated in the forest environment. This small example has been converted to include a faucet, for humans to use as well. Bioengineered organisms were controversial at the time, as it was feared they could cause unforeseen ecological complications. However, it is thanks to these early, sometimes bizarre experiments that we can enjoy the symbiotic environment we know today.

Lichen tales and back in the year 2023 

If you don’t notice lichen, you’re not alone. The green patches that grow on trees and stone are so ubiquitous, most of us don’t see them—and who spends their time looking at something so flat and small when there are human-scale things to deal with? But at a microscopic scale, lichen are quite the party. What looks like a boring green, grey or orange splotch on the pavement is actually a complicated network of life, consisting of different organisms growing together.

Lichens consist of a minimum of two species growing in symbiosis—one fungus, and one algae or cyanobacteria. The fungus—or in some cases, a few different fungi—grow the material and structure of the lichen. Their filaments twist in and around each other to create a kind of scaffolding, and the algae or cyanobacteria move in to the little spaces created by the fungal threads and spend their time photosynthesizing. The two or more organisms in a lichen exist in a symbiotic relationship—the photosynthesizer consumes the sunlight and creates carbohydrates for the fungi, and the fungi create a protected space for the photosynthesizer to exist. The two reproduce together as a unit, and in some cases, the fungi and algae have lost the ability to exist on their own—they can only survive as part of one another.

Lichen grow extremely slowly, not even one millimeter per year for some species. Their growth rate is so regular that scientists can measure the size of certain species to tell how long rocks have been exposed to the air—which is useful for determining the relative ages of prehistoric buildings, or for estimating how long glaciers have been gone from an area. Some lichens are thought to be amongst the oldest continually living organisms on earth, with some map lichens in the arctic estimated at 8,000 years or older.

Look around you on the rocks and trees. Are their surfaces really bare? Look closer! See if something tiny, flat and gray or green is living there. It’s a chosen family of tiny organisms, living together in a dense symbiotic network. Be gentle when you examine them—they’ve probably been living here for longer than you have!