Fruticose lichens (Shrub, Hair, Club)
Fruticose lichens are shrubby lichens and many fruticose lichens do indeed look like miniature shrubs an inch or so high. They are attached to their substrate by a single point and rise, or more usually, dangle from this. They can grow up from the ground, or be beard-like, small tangles looking a bit like Spanish moss when hanging down, attached to the substrate only at their bases, and usually with a circular cross-section.
Some foliose lichens can be stubby like fruticose lichens; however, close examination will reveal that the algal part exists only on one side of the flattish thallus whereas in fruticose lichens it exists as a ring around the thallus, even when it is the species are flattened.
They develop cup like items at the end of many of the lichen's branches. These are the reproductive cups, which produce spores.
The types of fruticose lichens are:
Club lichens: It has short, hollow vertical projections growing in small patches are radially symmetrical and have no lower surface and therefore neither lower cortex nor rhizines. They are varied shapes, from cup-shaped to narrowly pointed, generally unbranched or sparsely branched; small scale-like squamules usually surround the base of the podetia (stalk of a moss capsule). Colour varies from yellow to green to grey; the fruiting structures on the podetia are usually blackish or red.
Shrub lichens: They resemble club lichens in having somewhat thickened stems, and in being more or less radially symmetrical. In these species, however, the stems are also strongly branched. Occasionally the stems may be hollow, in which case they are again called podetia; usually, however, they are solid. Shrub lichens are typically upright and tufted.
Hair lichens: They differ from shrub lichens in having much finer, and proportionately much longer, branches. Hair lichens are frequently pendent.
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