lichens

Anyone know much about lichens? I'm not well-versed enough to be much sure about this. It seems like these little cyborgs— "cyber-" relating to the mechanics of steering; it's predominantly the fungal component of the lichen that determines the morphology, a more animal part steering the perhaps more mechanical photosynthetic component (is this accurate?) —are aptly chosen as the means to carrying out the Eldrich god's plans.

Symbiotically within the lichen, the fungus eats the dead, tears up and restructures the material world; at the other end of the metaphorical register one could imagine here, the photosynthetic partner— algae, cyanobacterium —eats the sun, performing an alchemy by which solar energy is fixed into the material (and I'm not quite recalling 9th grade biology here). The result is the little thing growing on rocks and logs, but as a friend at the University of Alaska Large Animal Research Station tells me, there's something figuratively alchemical going on when the lichens themselves are consumed by, say, caribou. As I understand it, the lichens shouldn't be nutritious enough for the caribou to survive: not enough carbohydrates compared to protein or something. And yet the big animals subsist on them.

I'm not confident I've represented the science accurately here (and I'm using "alchemy" in a figurative, inspecific sense); if I have, though, the metaphorical implications are pleasantly coherent.


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