All in black...

 It has been a long time since my last post - partly because I have been busy and also because there are not many wildflowers out at this time of the year, so I have been looking at lichens instead. Although this blog has the title of Newtonmore Wildflowers, my interests have expanded since then but maybe not everyone who reads this is as fascinated by lichens as I have become.  And I did not want to bore you too much with my lichen explorations... but in the absence of any other news, here goes!

I was helping some friends move house from a rather isolated cottage on the back road to Laggan, and took the opportunity to get a few twigs to look at (for lichens) and managed to find and identify two that were new to me. They were both quite small  crustose lichens, which just means that they grow as a thin crust on the bark.  The first one was a white crust with black fruiting bodies (apothecia) on it:

It's quite hard to identify these kind of lichens as there are loads with white crusts and black fruiting bodies. One way is to take a slice of the black discs and look at it under a microscope.  This is easier to say than to do as they are tiny - just a millimetre across! Here's what I saw:

The top layer is the visible top of the apothecium which looked black in the first photo.  The white area underneath has the fancy name of the hymenium, and is where the lichen develops spores, ready to shoot them out to spread itself.  The spores are very obvious here as  the dark lines are groups of spores. With more magnification, you can see the structure of each spore.

They look like beans but have a line across the middle  This helped me decide on the ID - Amandinea punctata.

The second lichen on the twig looked very different.  It was still only a tiny crustose patch but it looked a dirty brown-green.

Those round structures are fruiting bodies (apothecia) as well but this time they are like jam tarts with a different colour rim around the dark centre. Out came the razor blade again, and I took a slice through one of them.

The brown bit along the bottom is the bark, and the slice (or section) shows that this lichen also has dark spores with a line across the middle though the shape and size were a bit different. The red bar on the photo is 10 microns long which is one hundredth of a millimetre.  So that's why you need a microscope!

This lichen turned out to be Rinodina sophodes.

Another trophy from the removals was a piece of black plastic from the hen's enclosure roof, which was covered with lichens, so I couldn't resist taking a piece. You may think it's a bit odd to be enthused about a piece of plastic but it is covered with lichens for the curious mind to investigate!

I'll do another post to tell you what I have found on it so far, but the first thing I did was to shine a UV torch on it, and I'll leave you with the colourful result.