c. Foliose Lichens. Though many of the leafy lichens are provided with a tomentum of single hyphae, or with rhizinae on the under surface, the principal function of these structures is that of attaching the thallus. Sievers[839] tested the areas of absorption by placing pieces of the thallus of Parmeliae, of Evernia furfuracea, and of Cetraria glauca in a staining solution. After washing and cutting sections, it was seen that the coloured fluid had penetrated by the upper surface and by the edge of the thallus, as in crustaceous forms, but not through the lower cortex.
By the same methods of testing, he proved that water penetrates not only by capillarity between the closely packed hyphae, but also within the cells. A considerable number of lichens were used for experiment, and great variations were found to exist in the way in which water was taken up. It has been proved that in some species of Gyrophora water is absorbed from below: in those in which rhizinae are abundant, water is held by them and so gradually drawn up into the thallus; the upper cortex in this genus is very thick and checks transpiration. Certain other northern lichens such as Cetraria islandica, Cladonia rangiferina, etc., imbibe water very slowly, and they, as well as Gyrophora, are able to endure prolonged wet periods.
That foliose lichens do not normally contain much water was proved by Jumelle[840] who compared the weight of seven different species when freshly gathered, and after being dried; he found that the proportion of fresh weight to dry weight showed least variation in Parmelia acetabulum, as 1·14 to 1; in Xanthoria parietina it was as 1·21 to 1.
d. Fruticose Lichens. There is no water-conducting tissue in the elongate thallus of the shrubby or filamentous lichens, as can easily be tested by placing the base in water: it will then be seen that the submerged parts alone are affected. Many lichens are hygroscopic and become water-logged when placed simply in damp surroundings. The thallus of Usnea, for instance, can absorb many times its weight of water: a mass of Usnea filaments that weighed 3·8 grms. when dry increased to 13·3 grms. after having been soaked in water for twelve hours. Schrenk[841], who made the experiment, records in a second instance an increase in weight from 3·97 grms. to 11·18 grms. The Cladoniae retain large quantities of water in their upright hollow podetia. The Australian species, Cladonia retepora, the podetium of which is a regular network of holes, competes with the Sphagnum moss in its capacity to take up water.
To conclude: as a rule, heteromerous, non-gelatinous lichens do not contain large quantities of water, the weight of fresh plants being generally about three times only that of the dry weight. Their ordinary water content is indeed smaller than that of most other plants, though it varies at once with a change in external conditions. It is noteworthy that a number of lichens have their habitat on the sea-shore, constantly subject to spray from the waves, but scarcely any can exist within the spray of a waterfall, possibly because the latter is never-ceasing.
B. Storage of Water
The gonidial algae Gloeocapsa, Scytonema, Nostoc, etc. among Myxophyceae, Palmella and occasionally Trentepohlia among Chlorophyceae, have more or less gelatinous walls which act as a natural reservoir of water for the lichens with which they are associated. In these lichens the hyphae for the most part have thin walls, and the plectenchyma when formed—as below the apothecium in Collema granuliferum, or as a cortical layer in Leptogium—is a thin-walled tissue. In lichens where, on the contrary, the alga is non-gelatinous—as generally in Chlorophyceae—or where the gelatinous sheath is not formed as in the altered Nostoc of the Peltigera thallus, the fungal hyphae have swollen gelatinous walls both in the pith and the cortex, and not only imbibe but store up water.
Bonnier[842] had his attention directed to this thickening of the cell-walls as he followed the development of the lichen thallus. He made cultures from the ascospore of Physcia (Xanthoria) parietina and obtained a fair amount of hyphal tissue, the cell-walls of which became thickened, but more slowly and to a much less extent than when associated with the gonidia.
He noted also that when his cultures were kept in a continuously moist atmosphere there was much less thickening, scarcely more than in fungi ordinarily; it was only when they were grown under drier conditions with necessity for storage, that any considerable swelling of the walls took place. Further he found that the thallus of forms cultivated in an abundance of moisture could not resist desiccation as could those with the thicker membranes. These latter survived drying up and resumed activity when moisture was supplied.