Three New Lichens with Erin Manzitto-Tripp

How much do you know about lichens? These incredible taxa are understudied, but today’s guest is making sure they’re not undervalued. “You can’t look at lichens under a microscope and not become immediately obsessed,” says Dr. Erin Manzitto-Tripp. “It’s an endless world of magnificent, beautiful biodiversity.”

Erin works in the mountains of Colorado to describe new species of lichens along with the rest of her fantastic lab. For this paper they called not just on the power of nature, but also on the power of music. These three new species are named after the Indigo Girls, the individual members of the band and the band itself, in thanks for the many gifts Erin and others have received through their music.

Erin Manzitto-Tripp’s paper “The Thin Horizon of a Plan is Almost Clear: Towards a Lichen Biodiversity Inventory of the Southern Rocky Mountains, USA” is in volume 712 issue 3 of Phytotaxa.

It can be found here: https://doi.org/10.11646/phytotaxa.712.3.1

A transcript of this episode can be found here: Erin Manzitto-Tripp - Transcript

New Species: Lecanora indigoana, Lepraria saliersiae, Pertusaria rayana

Episode image credit: Erin Manzitto-Tripp

Listen to “The Wood Song,” whose lyrics gave this paper its title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0tUkepNqiA

Learn about the Lichens of Great Smoky Mountains National Park: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43188704

Check out Erin’s Lab and their work: https://tripp-report.com/

An article about these new species, with some beautiful photos: https://www.cpr.org/2025/07/24/cu-new-lichen-species-named-after-indigo-girls/

And the blog post from the Indigo Girls after hearing about their new species:

https://www.indigogirls.com/blog/bnjasxuusxhyfhyynob5oiko8om81a

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Music in this podcast is "No More (Instrumental)," by HaTom (https://fanlink.to/HaTom)

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