Starry Breck Lichen - Meet The Endangered
Starry Breck Lichen (Buellia asterella)
Any visitor to a temperate forest might be surprised to hear that a lichen - one of 20,000 fungal species that form colorful, seemingly ubiquitous colonies on bark or seemingly any other imaginable surface - could possibly be endangered.
Generally, they are a hardy taxon. But a few finicky species of lichen have indeed had trouble adapting to a human-dominated world. One such lichen is the Starry Breck, which was once found all over Europe, but is now limited to just a few patches of Norway and Germany.
The Starry Breck only grows in undisturbed, chalky soils of the sort preferred by grasslands. But on a continent of 750 million people with an agricultural history stretching back seven thousand years, most of these soils have been repurposed by humans to grow certain grasses - wheat, barley, oats, rye - that we like to eat.
There’s little hope for the Starry Breck, as its few remaining sites are situated amongst existing farms. The sort of restrictive conservation measures necessary would be too expensive and burdensome a sacrifice for this decidedly uncharismatic funga.
IUCN: Critically Endangered (CR)
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Great spotlight on this overlooked species. The fact that finicky lichen can't adapt to agricultural soils really shows how even the most resilient organisms have limits. I remmeber reading about similar challenges with fungal networks in grasslands and how soil chemistry changes from farming can ripple through entire ecosystems.