One of Our Favorite Lichens Gets a Name

This article was originally published in The Midden – Great Basin National Park: Vol. 25, No. 1, Summer 2025.

Dr. Steve Leavitt from BYU leads a group during the 2017 Lichen BioBlitz. He's examining lichens on a tree branch.

NPS/G. Baker

By Jason Hollinger & Nastassja Noell, Lichen Researchers

Nearly every year, Great Basin National Park holds a BioBlitz focusing on a particular order or group of life. In 2017, the BioBlitz focus was on lichens, and dozens of people came out to learn about this often-overlooked life group. Several lichen specialists led trips, including Dr. Steve Leavitt from Brigham Young University, who made several lichen collections and collaborated with other experts on the lichens he wasn’t sure about.

The lichen Lecanoropsis saligna covering an old juniper.

Jason Hollinger & Natassja Noell

Speed several years forward, and it turns out that one of those lichens was the same as one in Antarctica and the High Arctic (see this Midden article). And in 2025, another lichen turned out to be a new species, and the type locality is Snake Creek in Great Basin National Park! Let’s dig deeper into the story of how this new species got its name.

When field biologists think of lichens in the Great Basin, we probably immediately picture the riotous collage of colorful crusts on desert boulders and outcrops. The saxicolous lichen flora pulses like a symphony. But spare a moment for lichens on trees and shrubs. Junipers especially can support a wide diversity of epiphytic species. Another place to look for lichens that you might have missed is stumps and logs.

Fruiting bodies of Lecanoropsis subintricata seeming to “bubble up” out of the wood.

Jason Hollinger & Nastassja Noell

Introducing the Lecanora saligna group: unassuming crustose lichens that often cover large swaths of weathered wood. They blend in so effectively they can escape notice until you take out your hand lens. They’ve gone by many different names over the years and are notoriously difficult to narrow down to species with any confidence. Identifying them uses a process requiring advanced laboratory techniques like Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC) and careful measurements of subtle differences in spore size, a task made all the more challenging by their diminutive size (their spores are typically between one fifth to one tenth the thickness of a human hair!) But even armed with these observations, populations in the Great Basin often failed to fit comfortably into the neatly prepared Linnaean boxes available.

Ascospores (left), macroconidia (middle) and leptoconidia (right) of Lecanoropsis saligna.

Jason Hollinger & Nastassja Noell

Enter the up-and-coming European lichenologist Cristóbal Ivanovich working out of a renowned lab in Frankfurt, Germany. He decided to take the plunge down the rabbit hole. He developed several new primers and generated almost 200 new genetic sequences for dozens of representative collections from Europe and North America, assembling a massive dataset from which he and colleagues were able to infer evolutionary relationships and uncover the morphological, anatomical and chemical patterns that define the many species in the group. It turns out spores are not enough: one must also now learn to find and distinguish even more minute asexual propagules evocatively called macroconidia, mesoconidia, leptoconidia and microconidia. As a result, they were able to resurrect an old genus name, Lecanoropsis, for the group, and describe six species new to science.

Spore-bearing fruiting bodies of Lecanoropsis prolificans, the new lichen species with a type locality of Snake Creek, Great Basin National Park.

Jason Hollinger & Nastassja Noell

One of the six, Lecanoropsis prolificans, was described from a population right here in our backyard, near the Snake Creek Campground. This was found during the 2017 Lichen BioBlitz by Dr. Steve Leavitt from Brigham Young University. It is also common on the mahogany at Mather Overlook. In addition, this lichen species is found in Arizona, California (including Yosemite National Park), and Utah as well as Southwestern Canada, the Alps, Finnish Lapland, the Russian Caucasus, and north of Iran.

If we may take a slight liberty and think of learning the story of a lichen and honoring it with a scientific name, perhaps we can think of the type locality along Snake Creek as taking on a kind of sacred significance. Is this one of the many ways in which our displaced Western culture can begin to repair our spiritual connection with the land and the more-than-human world? It begins with the simple wonder every child knows instinctively: “What is the deal with this bubbly thing growing on that thousand-year-old tree?”

Reference:
Ivanovich, C., Weber, L., Palice, Z., Hollinger, J., Otte, V., Sohrabi, M., ... & Printzen, C. 2025. A taxonomic revision of the lichen genus Lecanoropsis (Lecanoraceae). Phytotaxa, 695(1), 1-56. Link