Sunday 22 March 2015

A blustery Mote Park with Lichens

Ramalina

There is supposed to be a very large Holm Oak there, Quercus ilex, listed In Bean's Trees and Shrubs, "Mote Park, Kent, 88 × 8 ft (1984);" but I do not remember seeing it at all! I wonder if there is a map of the Mote Park Trees? I shall have to ask Jadie.

This crustose lichen is I think a species of Lecanora, a very common species quite tolerant of high aerial Nitrogen, which Maidstone appears to be very subject to. The tan to brown centres of the "jam-tart" apothecia fruits are just visible, they should become more obvious later. This might be L. chlarotera, one of the commonest species of this very difficult complex.

 
This is the second extremely common crustose species we found, with black "jam tart" fruits and I think this is probably a Lecidiella species such as L. elaeochroma.


I think this one below is a Parmelia species, perhaps P. sulcata. The lobes of this species are stated to have distinct white lines and dots along which soralia form, and you can see the white "crinkling and dotting in this photo. The thallus is said to be rather flat, which I would not have said was obvious in the picture. The closely related P. encryptata can only be separated by DNA analysis.



This is Flavoparmelia caperata, which is said to be apple-green. I think the colouring is easier to see a) in real life, and b) from a distance. Although this is difficult to see in the image below, compare the greeny "greyness" in this particular thallus to that of the very grey lichen to the bottom right, possibly the Parmelia.


Flavoparmelia is not at all common at Mote Park, where there is probably too much N in the air for this species, and we only found this on one of the half dozen trees we looked at. The photosymbiont in Flavoparmelia caperata is thought to be Trebouxia (or Pseudotrebouxia?) gelatinosa, http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/0-306-48173-1_23#page-2, which is thought to be able to produce zoospores and potentially free-living colonies, thus allowing later recombination with other strains of the fungal mycobiont http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=960512.

This large tree trunk is covered in two main lichens, one of the common Xanthoria species (one common one is X. parietina) almost reliant on high N. levels, and then a grey Physcia sp. with very narrow lobes in comparison to the Parmelia we looked at earlier.


This is I think a Phaeophyscia species, a foliose grey lichen very lobulate at the margins, next to developing thalli of Xanthoria:



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