Not sure how I managed to never hit this species with UV. I would describe the colour as a bright, hot, lipstick pink. I am unsure if this lichen is actually fluorescing or if something else to do with how the pigments show up under UV light - maybe @[email protected] would know. Picture doesn’t quite do it justice.

You are pointing a UV lamp at it which probably sends out 365 nm or 395 nm photons. The lichen is shooting back photons with a broad range of wavelengths, and a lot of ~600 - 750 nm ones (red). So, the UV photons had to be "captured" by some molecular system, the system dissipated some energy, and then re-radiated some of these longer-wavelength photons.

The general term that covers the many different possibilities is "photoluminescence". In this case we can say for sure that the lichen exhibits "UV-induced photoluminescence", because it is re-emitting lower energy (longer-wavelength) photons. It is common to make the connection "photoluminescence" = "fluorescence", but technically fluorescence makes specific claims about how the light is re-emitted (singlet -> singlet emission), and it is not the only luminescence process. Other examples of luminescence are phosphorescence from a triplet state and luminescence via charge-recombination. So, to call it "fluorescence" in the strict sense we need know what the exact pathway is.

That said, when it comes to biological pigments fluorescence is generally the most common pathway. Triplets that live long enough to produce light are generally undesirable as they can react indiscriminately with molecules inside of the cell as well as produce reactive oxygen species, and good phosphorescent materials often combine metals and heavy atoms that are not as abundant in living tissue.

So, knowing nothing else, and seeing that red light comes out when you shine UV/blue light on a lichen, it is generally fair to call it "fluorescence".

Now, if we discuss this specific lichen... I have looked it up and it does get interesting! Do you have it with you? I suspect that its fluorescence might be different during the day than during the night.

I can find online two significant fluorescent components: parietin, which produces the fluorescent yellow pigment, and Chlorophyll a/b, which produces red fluorescence. There is an interesting paper exploring the idea that one functional purpose of parietin's fluorescence is that it can transfer energy to the algae to boost their photosynthesis. Their conclusions in the paper is that the idea is not supported by the evidence, so, a "negative result". It is a fun example of the type of research that is performed in photobiology and also an example to show that even negative results can be interesting enough to be published!

As for the difference between day and night - if what you see is a combination of the fluorescence of parietin and chlorophyll, then the color might change with the day/night cycle. Photosynthetic organisms regulate the flow of excess photon energy towards a safe non-radiative dissipation pathway in response to light. This is called the non-photochemical quenching pathway, and during the day this pathway tends to be active. During the night there is little light, and so this protective pathway shuts-off. This allows more of the absorbed photon energy to flow into the radiative fluorescence pathway, increasing the red fluorescence. You can actually see this easily with plants - you can dark adapt a leaf and then compare its fluorescence with that of a leaf that is being exposed to a bright light. The dark-adapted one will usually show significantly more red fluorescence.

This time you did ask, so I won't apologize for my essay 😆 But I am a bit sorry I didn't have the time to make it shorter.