Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Kerry Knudsen (photo: UCR Herbarium)
In the words of Jai-Rui Chong of the Los Angeles Times, Kerry Knudsen, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside Herbarium, ”took a lichen” to President Barack Obama. Knudsen named a newfound species of lichen, Caloplaca obamae, after the newly elected president. Knudsen explained that he was collecting samples of the new species during the election process, and the final peer review came back on Inauguration Day. He finished the corrections while watching the event on television.
The orange lichen, which is a combination of fungi and algae, has only been found in ten patches of soil, including an old cattle pen, on Santa Rosa Island, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California. This place is ideal for the organisms because they can only live in damp, undisturbed locations. When the grazing of cattle stopped on the island about ten years ago, the lichen were able to live and grow again. Knudsen says its resilience reminded him of Obama.
Knudsen, who has no academic degrees, became interested in lichen after he retired as a construction worker in 2000. Since then, he has built a collection of more than 10,000 lichen and published more than 70 peer-reviewed research papers on the subject.
Obama is not the first U.S. president to have a life form named after him. For example, in 2005, two former Cornell University entomologists, Quentin Wheeler and Kelly Miller, named a species of slime-mold beetle after President George W. Bush (Agathidium bushi). They named other slime-mold beetles after Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Darth Vader.
-David Wallechinsky, Jackie Gallegos
UC Riverside Scientist Names Lichen for Obama (by Jai-Rui Chong, Los Angeles Times)
Caloplaca obamae, a New Species from Santa Rosa Island, California (by Kerry Knudsen, Opuscula Philolichenum)
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld Are Now Species of Slime-Mold Beetles—But Strictly in Homage (press release, Cornell University)
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