Happy pi Day! 3.14, March 14th. Get it? It would be even more nerdalicious if I said "Happy pi Day!" to you at 1:59 because then it would be pi out to it's fifth decimal place. See, 3.14159.... um, ya...anyway....
I've been teaching botany to Emma and Beeb (by "teaching" I really mean "showing", and by "botany" I really mean "mostly botany, some lichenology, and occasionally some zoology as the mood suits"). Right. So about the botany. We've been identifying plants, and in that process I discovered that the classification for botanical life has been under some flux: the addition of some categories, the divergence of others. But not all botanists agree on which should be used, so both systems are being used simultaneously, which has lead to some confusion. (So are liverworts Bryophytes or not?? Not.) And then it turns out that not everybody is using the good ol' fashioned kingdom system any more. You know: the Animal Kingdom (Animalia) the Plant Kingdom (Plantae)-- which is really just as well because the Brits and the Americans can't seem to agree on whether we have 5 or 6 kingdoms, and whether or not we should call certain single-celled buggies Protista or Monera (incidentally, I side with the Protists). And then there are some people who keep calling algae Protista instead of Plantae because they happen to be single-celled algae instead of say, kelp or something, though an alga by any other name would still smell like feet.
Why all the kerfuffle? DNA. Biologists of every persuasion have been elbow-deep in the DNA (or RNA) of their particular organism and have found all sorts of exciting things! Things that look the same on the outside are not so much the same on the inside. (This is especially true with tiny things like single-celled organisms.) That means the old classification systems are just inadequate to describe reality. Um. Story of my life! Tangential to my adventures in Biology Land I've taken a few little trips along the Personal History Trail-- talk about old classifications being inadequate! I mean, really. I suddenly find myself with pools of personal data that I hadn't properly analyzed before. I simply cannot be what I thought I was. Thus we beg the question, What the heck am I anyway?
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| some crustose lichens with apothecia |
Enough about me, let's hear more about lichens. The Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy hosts a load of free classes about nature-y things to the public. I recently went to one about lichens. By the way, lichens are mutual symbiosis at its best. It's a happy relationship between an alga and a fungi. (The joke of lichenology goes like this: Alice Alga and Freddy Fungi started a-lichen each other, though their relationship is already on the rocks. (chuckle. chuckle.) Yes, all lichenologists are that funny.) Lichenologists have tried to grow a lichen fungus and a lichen alga separately to see if they can survive independent of each other. They can't. All they get is this creepy slime mold looking goo with a horrible case of failure to thrive. Story of my life!-- again! I mean, mutualism is totally required for my personal and eternal development. Otherwise I really just end up like some kind of creepy slime-mold looking goo with a horrible case of failure to thrive. (I know, I know. It's all about me again...) I use the term "mutualism" a little metaphorically here-- but you know what I mean. You know the kind of people that are so NOT like you they seem like they really could be another species. Not a species in the same genus, either. We're talking different kingdoms (if you're into kingdoms, that is. If not, insert domain where the word kingdom is)! Sheesh.
This is where the What the heck am I anyway? question gets kind of critical. How can I determine what kind of fungus I can tolerate if'I'm not really sure what kind of alga I am. Or maybe I'm not even an alga. Maybe I'm a photosynthesizing cyanobacteria. Just sayin'.
