Arseniy Belosokhov

@belosokh.bsky.social

PhD student at @ualberta.bsky.social (University of Alberta) lichen symbiosis | evolution | fungal biology Canada 🇨🇦 he/him, but for #fungi, such concepts are irrelevant

What do you read when you see "Further work will be required..." in a research paper? I'll start "This was originally in the manuscript, but Reviewer 2 said it was speculative, so now it has been exiled into the last paragraph."

Whilst at Whitlingham C.P. today I walked past this thistle rosette and twigged that it looked slightly unusual. I stopped and had a closer look, noticing that one of the leaves has edged by the slime mould Diachea leucopodia.

The basal rosette of a thistle, showing lots of spiky leaves radiating from the centre. On the left one of them has a noticeable white and dark brown edge.A close-up of the left-hand thistle leaf, showing a slime mould growing all around the edges.A close-up of some of the slime mould fruiting bodies, dark brown ovals with a slight 'peacock' purple sheen, on short white stalks.

In this paper, we show that photobiont diversity increases as lichens age. Interestingly, as the thallus grows, autosporine algae become more prevalent at the expense of zoosporine algae, likely because the latter play a key role in lichen establishment. 1url.cz/@Proto

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