The green crust beneath the fruitbody is the vegetative part of the lichen.
So is it a Lichen AND a mushroom? Is it a symbiosis? Or is the mushroom the fruit of the lichen, like most mushrooms are the fruit of an underground network?
I think I see other lichen produce similar fruit, stem-like. Could these be argued to be mushrooms as well?
The short answer is that the mushroom is the fruit of the fungal partner (not the whole lichen), the mushroom only produces spores for the fungal member of the symbiosis. The spores from this mushroom will need to find their own algae to pair up with in order to become a lichen.
The fungal partner in a lichen is called a mycobiont and the photosynthesizing partner (algae and/or cyanobacteria) is called the photobiont. The vast majority of mycobionts are ascomycetes, which is why many lichen fruitbodies look like miniature ascomycete mushrooms (cup shaped, blob or nodule-like). Lichenomphalina is what’s called a ‘basidiolichen’, less than 1% of lichens have a basidiomycete as the mycobiont (many basidiomycetes are what we think of as ‘cap and stem’ mushrooms). This lichen produces classic cap and stem mushroom because that’s what the fungal partner’s fruit looks like.
Sorry if that’s confusing, I’m not a great explainer sometimes!
No, it’s a great explanation, thanks. It shows me there is much I do not know about lichen. And the site you linked has what I need: https://www.anbg.gov.au/lichen/what-is-lichen.html
Who’s that spikey fella just to the right there?
I didn’t even notice that, haha, maybe a twig-end with the needles still attached?
Is this lichen doing convergent evolution to grow a mushroom or a mushroom did convergent evolution to become lichen but remembered how to make mushrooms?
I think this is just the fungal partner reproducing separately from the lichen as a whole (usually propagules that contain genetic material from both the photosynthetic and fungal partner) Once the spores germinate they will have to survive on their own until they can buddy up with algae and/or bacteria.
