Mildly Interesting

It was a rainy day and I took a small broken off piece home for some macro-photography. This lichen, also called coral lichen or Cladia retipora has a slow-growing, highly absorbent lattice-like structure. The colonies expand at only a few millimeters a year, and normally I find little buds about the size of a golf ball, so to find a granite outcrop with 100+ domes each about the size of a basketball hemisphere was pretty rare. It had just rained too, so they have absorbed a ton of water. In the close-up you can see how the structure interacts with the surface tension of water to hold water droplets within the lattice itself, not just absorbed into the body of the lichen.

This species are unique to my part of the world so its pretty exciting to find such a huge undisturbed colony.