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Life history strategy of Lepraria borealis at an Antarctic inland site, Coal Nunatak

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2010

Andreas ENGELEN ,
Peter CONVEY  and
Sieglinde OTT
Andreas ENGELEN
Affiliation:
Institute of Botany, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Universitätsstr. 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany. Email: otts@uni-duesseldorf.de
Peter CONVEY
Affiliation:
British Antarctic Survey, Natural Environment Research Council, High Cross, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0ET, England, UK.
Sieglinde OTT
Affiliation:
Institute of Botany, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Universitätsstr. 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany. Email: otts@uni-duesseldorf.de
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Abstract

Coal Nunatak is an ice-free inland nunatak located on southern Alexander Island, adjacent to the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Situated close to the Antarctic continent, it is characterized by harsh environmental conditions. Macroscopic colonization is restricted to micro-niches offering suitable conditions for a small number of lichens and mosses. The extreme environmental conditions place particular pressures on colonizers. Lepraria borealis is the dominant crustose lichen species present on Coal Nunatak, and shows distinctive features in its life history strategy, in particular expressing unusually low selectivity of the mycobiont towards potential photobionts. To assess selectivity, we measured algal DNA sequence polymorphism in a region of 480–660 bp of the nuclear internal transcribed spacer region of ribosomal DNA. We identified three different photobiont species, belonging to two different genera. We interpret this strategy as being advantageous in facilitating the colonization and community dominance of L. borealis under the isolation and extreme environmental conditions of Coal Nunatak.

Keywords

lichenphotobiontsreproductive modeselectivity
Type
Research Article
Information
The Lichenologist , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , May 2010 , pp. 339 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © British Lichen Society 2010

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