The unlikely life of lichens
How does one describe lichen to a fifth-grader? I’ve tried, many times, and often end up tongue-tied and bemused. With a hundred pairs of elementary eyes examining the forest each week during Mountain School season, it’s hard to walk 20 feet without a curious kid asking, “Where did that come from?” or “Why does that look like that?” And lichen seems to be one of those things that, although often disregarded by the adult eye, jumps out to a kid like a neon hippopotamus. “What’s that?!” Tell a group of students it’s a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an alga, and they won’t hesitate to point out that it looks nothing like a mushroom or a seaweed. And what does symbiosis mean?
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