“There are approximately 2,000 species of lichens in Hawai‘i,” says Robert Lucking, a lichenologist at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, home to one of the largest research collections of lichens in the world. That so many lichens are endemic to the Islands wasn’t known until Lucking and his team started sequencing the DNA about a year ago. “If you look closely,” says Lucking, “all lichens grow more or less similarly; the variety of shapes is reached by variation of a few simple parameters, i.e. growing horizontal or vertical, attached to or separate from the substrate.