Jewel Lichen

Jewel lichen creates brilliant orange-yellow crusts on limestone and concrete, thriving on calcium-rich substrates where few other organisms can establish. It's often the first colonizer of new concrete structures, beginning the slow process of biological weathering that will eventually break down human infrastructure.

This lichen demonstrates patience as competitive strategy. It occupies niches others can't use (high-calcium substrates), grows imperceptibly slowly, but persists for centuries. By the time human structures are abandoned, jewel lichen colonies are already established and accelerating their breakdown. The business parallel is companies positioned for long-term demographic or technological shifts that seem irrelevant now but become dominant later.