Jennifer Shmukler
Professor Alexandratos
MHC 200
BioBlitz: A Pleasant Surprise
“Mom, I have to go to Staten Island in a few weeks to go to a park for Macaulay.” Her face looked as if I had grown a third head. She asked, “Why can’t you go to Prospect Park or Central Park? Do they really have to make you go all the way to Staten Island? What are you going to do there for six hours?” That’s what I thought too, until we arrived at Freshkills Park, with our BioBlitz T-shirts and hats on, ready to tackle on what was ahead.
When given the map of the park, my friends and I couldn’t help but thinking about what we are going to see: the animals, the wetlands; we thought we would explore it all. I mean, we did have four hours after accounting for travel time, right? Wrong. While we saw some students excitedly put on their wet suits and boots, we were, unfortunately, granted hand lenses and compasses. As told by our guide, Jessica Allen, we were going to search for lichens. My friends and I looked at each other in confusion, because we had no idea what lichens were. Nevertheless, we started on our journey in search for them. After a short van ride and trek through fields polluted with garbage that has still not been fully excavated/covered up since the landfill has been turned into a park, we arrived at a small plain in front of what seemed to be an entrance to a forest. We were going to venture into a small section of the heavily wooded area and count how many lichens we could find on a tree. Interestingly enough, lichens are not just plants or animals; they are created as a result of a symbiotic relationship between algae and fungus. According to lichenologist Trevor Goward, “Lichens are fungi that have discovered agriculture” because these fungi cannot produce food on their own, they combine with photosynthetic algae, which cannot survive on a tree alone without the fungi’s protection. What was the most eye-opening part of learning about lichens is that they are used to detect air quality because they cannot grow in areas of high pollution, no matter how much sunlight they are exposed to. The presence of lichens in any area, whether they be on trees or rocks signifies that the area’s air is rendered quite clean. In fact, one of the most interesting facts that I learned that day while counting lichens and chatting with Jessica was that Central Park is actually home to many species of lichens. In fact, during Macaulay’s BioBlitz in Central Park in 2013, she and her students actually observed many lichens in the north end of the park had nearly as many in the south end of the park, which receives about 75 percent of the park’s annual visitors. She accredited this to the improved air quality in Central Park due to the cultivation of trees and plant life.
Even though I didn’t get to put on a wet suit that day, I was very glad that I learned so much about an organism that I had no idea existed and one that proved to be so vital to the environmental stability of an area. Even though I was quite disappointed at first, I later realized just how much I learned about lichens in those few hours. Now I can’t help but try to find a tree or rock with lichens on it whenever I’m in a park, and then I feel a bit better because the presence of lichens means that humans didn’t totally ruin the area yet, and that’s always good, right?
