Day 183: My lunchtime walk today yielded up the Best Rock Ever! It holds BOTH species of Pilophorus side-by-side (clavatus on the left, acicularis on the right), and to further add to its merits, it's on the trail on which I'll be conducting a lichen walk during Bio-Blitz.
My Bio-Blitz walk will cover about a dozen lichen genera, and then our volunteers will be sent out on their own, cameras in hand, to photograph as many lichen species as they can find, with an eye to publishing them on iNaturalist. However, as a secondary goal, they will be specifically documenting Pilophorus in the hopes of getting a better picture of the time-frame in which this pioneer lichen colonizes "freshly exposed" rock surfaces. In my personal experience with P. acicularis, "freshly exposed" may range from 20-60 years.
In my original plan, I would have been taking people to two sites approximately a mile apart in order to view both species. The discovery of the Best Rock Ever just made my job enormously easier!
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