The world is a huge museum. You might probably have already seen Mother Nature’s paintings when you went to Tagaytay last weekend or maybe when you were in Baguio with your family for one week. Perhaps when you went to Tarlac last Saturday to buy fruits from a farm or when you had that scientific conference in Osaka and you happened to visit their beautiful national parks. Bottom line is: these paintings or paint splashes, are rather everywhere. Lichens are everywhere. And one can only hope that these works of art will not perish forever.

It was the summer of 2008 when I first learned about lichens. I was on our fieldtrip in Rizal as a boy scout when a senior scout pointed out the mesmerizing colors “painted” on the trees that were lichens. And no, he was not talking about the shapeshifters from the movie Underworld which first came to mind upon hearing it. My young mind did not ask questions like why do these organisms grow on trees? How do they spread? What are these things, really? No. Instead, my eyes were just innocently captivated by the different colors existing on the trunk of the trees which did not and still, do not appear on the trees in Manila.

Six years later, I was about to start my senior year in college and our thesis group had to come up with a topic for our research. We were on the verge of desperation when a silver lining came upon us. With brains full of unrealistic and empty thesis ideas, we hopefully approached an unacquainted professor, Ms. Krystle Angelique Santiago, someone who we never had exchanged words with before, and asked her to take us as her first thesis advisees for that school year. We already knew that she specializes on lichens. Without hesitation, she politely agreed. So my life basically revolved around lichens starting that day. I started becoming fascinated about the organism once again, but this time, with scholastic depth and a fire to explore its complexity. The lichens I studied in college and those that I currently study now are far much different from those “splashes of paint” that once captivated me when I was young. In some ways, I can call my fruticose lichens the higher forms. Looking back, I believe that in my own consideration, I started becoming a “scientist” when we were processing and identifying the specimens we collected from Kalinga. The dual nature of lichens added to its difficulty to study but served a push for me to further explore them. With a unique study like that and an adviser who purposefully shared her passion in research, I was at the top of my game! And upon my own version of “exploration”, I learned several things:

Lichens are magnificent organisms. They grow on almost all kinds of substrates (barks, rocks, park benches, old wooden signage, etc.) so long as the dispersion is successful. But after dispersion, in order to continue with the growth, several parameters must be first met. Lichens love to exist in an unpolluted, moist environment with low temperature and that is moderately kissed by sunlight from time to time. A mountainous province like Kalinga harbors countless lichen species that can coexist together. A place like that can be a niche for these fungi which come in different forms and colors. However, they grow incredibly slow. An individual fruticose lichen which measures up to, say, 5 inches in length, actually took a lot of years to grow. Hence it is important to consider which lichen samples in the field an individual should collect to avoid endangering these organisms. It is usually advisable to leave out small (or growing) samples; this gives them the chance to grow further and flourish in their habitat. Furthermore, each lichen species has a distinct morphology that can be easily recognized during the study. For example, under the same genus, two separate species can be differentiated from each other by the presence or absence of fruiting bodies or apothecia. And these apothecia play a major role in the lichen spore dispersion. Interestingly, lichens are great sources of bioactive compounds which are their secondary metabolites. Vast number of metabolites recorded are exclusive only in lichens as opposed to plants. This makes the exploration of lichens much more rewarding and timely.

But it was not until I was in UST Graduate School when I started studying the application of fruticose lichens. So far, the results are overwhelming and promising to the pharmaceutical industry. But I guess it can be said that without the relevance of my undergraduate work to myself, I will not be as striving as I am today with the materialization of my graduate study. I have two mentors, old and new, whose hands pull me to places I never thought were reachable for me. Lichens have taken me far. My mentors have taken me farther. So here I am, writing an article that is not really scientific nor poetic but a liberation of ideas of how a random memory, current passion, and unexpected events share a common ground.

I have only scratched the surface of lichenology. There is still a lot to explore, a lot to learn and discover about lichens – things that have not been proven yet. With the number of people studying them in the country, I hope that more would be fascinated with the complexity of these fungi and their existence in nature. They are, in fact, the pioneers of it. Up to this date, the significance of lichens in the environment is precious as they are the bioindicators of air quality in the place they thrive in. Therefore, in contrast to what I have said before, I now raise a question: when will you explore lichens?

–  Mark Gabriel M. Galinato