Hello! Fun fact about lichen: it started the environmental movement! In the early 1960s, the U.S. government wanted to test a nuclear bomb on Alaska’s North Slope, in a plan called Project Chariot. The fallout would have been deadly to local communities because of their dependence on caribou meat, because caribou eat lichen, which picks up strontium-90 from radioactive fallout easily. Scientists William Pruitt and Barry Commoner used this info to stop the project and raise ecological awareness!
