Cristopher Garcia
Professor Alexandratos
MHC 200
When I initially received an email from my advisor Joanna, urging me to sign up for BioBlitz timeslot I did not think too much about it and saw it simply as another mandatory event that I would have to attend. The event slipped my mind for a couple of weeks until the fateful Sunday when I had to wake up at the crack of dawn to catch a ferry to an ominous place I had heard of only in legends: Staten Island. After disembarking on the island, my fellow Macaulay scholars and I boarded a bus and proceeded to venture deeper into the abyss. Now immeasurably far from civilization, with nothing but our foldable bucket hats and oversized BioBlitz t-shirts, we were divided into groups and sent out into Freshkills Park.
I discovered that a BioBlitz is an event that focuses on finding and identifying as many species plants, animals and other organisms in a specific area. All of a sudden this event didn’t seem as bad as I originally thought it would be. Perhaps it would be fun to categorize different types of insects, or watch birds through a pair of binoculars, or maybe even go fishing for different species of fish. But my excitement left as quickly as it came when I was given a hand lens and instructed to look for lichens.
My group leaders were two students at the CUNY Graduate Center whose studies focus on lichens. They explained to me that lichens usually consist of a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae. They are important to our ecosystem because they serve as an indicator of good air quality. While I initially misidentified them as moss I was quickly corrected and told that they are in fact a different species from moss. After I had a vague idea of what I was searching for, my team and I set off to look for different lichen specimen. We were given a clear sheet with 3 by 3 squares, each containing circles inside of them and instructed to hold the sheet up to the trees. We would then count how many of the circles had lichens in them and document the different types of lichens we had found. We discovered many different types of lichens such as crustose and fruticose but mainly we ran into foliose lichens, which, as their name suggests, have a leafy appearance.
BioBlitz turned out to be nothing like what I had originally expected. Although I would have preferred to spend this day in the sweltering heat by the water, looking for fish, I am glad I got the opportunity to learn about such an interesting species that I had never even heard of before. I am thankful for my group leaders and for the enthusiasm and intelligence with which they spoke about lichens. I am not much of a scientist but I hope that the data I helped them collect serves a useful purpose and somehow contributes to furthering our knowledge of these organisms. Perhaps in the future we can find a more precise way to use lichens as a measure of our air quality, and thus be able to take preemptive action before certain problems with our air quality get too bad.
