Sixteen lichens nobody had ever named, hiding on rainforest leaves in China

On the underside of leaves in Hainan's mountain rainforests lives a whole world most people walk straight past. Lichens of the genus Mazosia — tiny partnerships between a fungus and an alga — spread across tropical leaves in patterns so similar that scientists lumped many of them together for over a century. A new study in the journal IMA Fungus looks closer, with DNA and microscopes, and finds sixteen entirely new species where few were recognised before. Most partner with an alga called Phycopeltis, whose neat rectangular cells form radiating plates inside the lichen. The team also built a worldwide identification key for the whole genus, first described in 1854, so future researchers can tell these lookalikes apart. Their prediction: Hainan's less-explored forest fragments hold still more unnamed species — if the understory they depend on stays intact.

SDG 15 · Life on land