Lichen, Moss and other botanical wonders!

I'm sure I won't draw a lot of readers if I spend too much time talking about lichen and/or moss. However, I have been experimenting with my new camera and took some photos of some great little micro-communities of these organisms.

In case you didn't know, lichen is neither a plant nor a moss, but two organisms that live symbiotically together and wouldn't survive without the other.
One organism is an algae, which provides photosynthetic energy to the system, and the other organism is a fungus, which provides anchoring and water storage capabilities.
Actually a VERY fascinating system and I even got some first-graders excited about it during a tour at the botanical garden the other day!
Lichen mostly reproduces asexually by dispersing clusters of fungus spores or cells. Some reproduce sexually through a mostly fungus-like spore life cycle.
They have many different growth forms from hard, dry and crusty, to almost feathery to very soft and lush. These different forms also have fun names like "crustose" "fruticose" "squamulose" and "leprose"--sounds like some terrible diseases!
These first two photos are of two types of lichen (yellow and grayish) and I think one green moss growing on the trunk of a tree.
And here's an image of lichens from one of my favorite artists, Ernst Haeckel--he drew this in 1904.
Next time you see some lichen on a rock or a tree, take a minute to stop and feel it and think about the little tiny living things that make up the weird, crusty, tough growth and what kind of niche in its habitat does it fulfill?
Now, onto mosses!
This next photo isn't especially good, but it shows at least three (maybe four?) mosses living together in a shady, rocky corner. There's the bright green on the left, some brownish green stuff and the smaller, grayish clumps are also moss (I think).
Here are a couple of extreme close-ups of the tiny grayish moss--it has its sporophyts up for reproduction!

Mosses are technically plants, but do not products flowers or seeds. They only have one set of chromosomes (haploid) rather than two sets of chromosomes like most plants (diploid). The sporophyte step in the life cycle is diploid, however. They also often reproduce asexually with rhizome-like spreading/growth.