Editor's Note: Paige tells us that these beauties were found at Shin Falls in Scotland. Our nature photographer has a good eye for the small details in nature. However, for Your Editor these discoveries sparked a memory from Biology 102, which I will now share.

Dr S, of the University of Pittsburgh, taught us about fungi and lichens and the like. He was a plant physiologist, himself a transplant from southern California. Where the movie people live.

Elektra and I used to frequent the professor's office hours, because he told good stories. He told us about one of the hazards of practising Science within spitting distance of Hollywood. You remember all those horror movies from the 50s and 60s? The ones where some usually harmless piece of Nature – say, a grasshopper, or a prairie dog – is accidentally subjected to radiation? And then grows to an ENORMOUS size and threatens to consume the nearest convenient metropolis? Directors were keen on these things, it seems.

One day a film crew showed up at the plant lab, aka greenhouse. The director had decided to make a film about. . . wait for it. . . killer lichens. And the university's stellar collection were chosen to be the stars. They'd just film them, you see, and through the magic of Hollywood and forced perspective, voilà! Monster plants that ate. . . wherever the actors were pretending to be this week.

In vain did Dr S protest that no amount of forced perspective was going to make a lichen look threatening. Apparently, the crew had to determine that experimentally. So he left them to it. It took three whole days of filming moodily-lit symbiotes from various angles to come to the conclusion that the enterprise was a bust, the prof was right, and lichens could in no way be coaxed into looking belligerent. So off they went.

Enjoy this harmless-looking lichen that Paige found. – DG

Paigetheoracle

16.10.23 Front Page

Back Issue Page