Eyelash Fungi ID

[Lancashire Lad]

Originally Posted by PMG

....I think the damaged bit is laid on top of the rest of it which is why the lashes look like they are 'inside' ....

I think you are right PMG.

On closer inspection of the photo it does look like a small piece containing "eyelashes" laid on top of the disc.

I originally thought it was a hole with part of the moss showing through.

Regards
Mike.

[Chris Yeates]

Originally Posted by Lancashire Lad

As a complete beginner regarding fungi, could I ask what might be a naive question?


Is it normal for "eyelashes" to appear on such an inner margin? - I thought they only occured around the outer circumference.

Sorry if this is a silly question but I am genuinely curious.

Regards
Mike.

not at all naive Mike

because of the way that fungal hyphae 'threads' work - very different from how plants grow - you do find anomalies; I have seen 'discos' like these in some strange configurations and you could get the outer hairs in other parts of the fruiting body if it had been damaged for example

I'm sure we've all seen mushroom 'twins' in those bought from the supermarket . . . and sometimes in the wild you can find one cap growing 'upside down' on top of another

this is why you generally need several fruiting bodies of any fungus (from the microscopic to the big brackets) at different stages of growth to be able to understand (and name) what's going on; the Roger Phillips book was a bit of a breakthrough on this as it showed how varied one fungus can be as it developed

regards

Chris

[Chris Yeates]

a bit more work has come up with the fact that following Schumacher's 1990 monograph on the genus Scutellinia asperior has been moved into the genus Ramsbottomia following examination of the type specimen

there is an interesting article by Maurice Moss (Mycologist vol. 8 pt 4 pp 183-185) on finding a Scutellinia while gardening; his first thought was scutellata until he looked at it under the microscope and saw the spherical spores, and then he thought asperior but the end result was Scutellinia trechispora in view of the recent literature. At least we have got this fungus down to a couple of names - we're close!)

Oh well! no one said this mycology game would be a doddle . . .

g'night

Chris

[Chris Yeates]

hi Rob

your fungus arrived safe and sound and I've spent the best part of an hour and a half looking at it

I am now happy to name it Scutellinia trechispora; the ornamentation seems a little on the low side, but spore dimensions, the fact that the spores have truncate rather than pointed ornamentation, hair length, the fact that the hairs have forked 'roots' all point to that species; I am very confused as to what the Swiss book calls 'armatospora' - they suggest it might be the same as Ramsbottomia asperior which is a rather different fungus; as I think I mentioned before, Nordic Macromycetes Vol. 1 synonymises armatospora with trechispora, but the BMS Fungal Records Database keeps them separate; I shall keep the specimen in my herbarium - I've got a lot of named collections which I need to send to Kew at some stage

single ascospore below

best wishes

Chris

[RobSutton]

Originally Posted by Chris Yeates

hi Rob

your fungus arrived safe and sound and I've spent the best part of an hour and a half looking at it

I am now happy to name it Scutellinia trechispora; the ornamentation seems a little on the low side, but spore dimensions, the fact that the spores have truncate rather than pointed ornamentation, hair length, the fact that the hairs have forked 'roots' all point to that species; I am very confused as to what the Swiss book calls 'armatospora' - they suggest it might be the same as Ramsbottomia asperior which is a rather different fungus; as I think I mentioned before, Nordic Macromycetes Vol. 1 synonymises armatospora with trechispora, but the BMS Fungal Records Database keeps them separate; I shall keep the specimen in my herbarium - I've got a lot of named collections which I need to send to Kew at some stage

single ascospore below

best wishes

Chris

Thanks very much Chris you're a star.

[Chris Yeates]

hi Rob

I've managed to get hold of Schumacher's 1990 paper on Scutellinia . . . over 100 pages just on this one genus (!); it's incredibly thorough with notes on spore germination. scanning electron microscope images of spores etc.

some problems I can now see sorting themselves out - Scutellinia armatospora he synonymises with trechispora - the key character being that armatospora has short hairs, Schumacher has seen the type and has found longer hairs on it (also most of the material is immature and has been partially eaten by insects - not what you should be basing a 'new' species on, really)

unfortunately the Swiss book was published in 1984 - well before Schumacher's monograph so I wouldn't rely on it (it has only a tiny sample of the European Scutellinia species in any case) - it's a pity that because the Swiss books (and I have all but the last one) are so well produced that everyone assumes (as they do with other books) that all the stuff in there is OK . . . sadly not - for example, the 'Mollisia ligni' in FOS 1 is about as far away from ligni as you could get in my humble opinion

anyway the upshot is that I now feel 'tooled up' to look at any Scutellinias which you (or indeed other WAB-bers) might care to send

cheers

Chris