Off to foreign parts!

 I have just come back from a week in Berlin, visiting family.  It was my first visit  and the temperature was in the thirties so a bit of a change from the chilly Scottish weather we left behind.  I was surprised at the number of trees in Berlin, lining the streets and in parks.  Just behind my son's flat were huge beech trees where we saw woodpeckers and red squirrels.  When walking across one park, I found a nut on the ground which looked different from anything I had seen before.

Turkish Hazel

It turned out to be a hazel nut from a Turkish Hazel, Corylus colurna.  The long extensions to the cup were covered in sticky (glandular) hairs.  You can see them best in the picture bottom left as white hairs with black blobs on top.  The Hazel trees that grow locally in Newtonmore are Corylus avellana but there are not that many of them.  The one I found at the North end of Newtonmore had a lichen that I had not found before, called Arthonia radiata. It is the speckled looking one at the top of the photo.

Hazel twig with lichens (5mm squares in background)

The closeup shows the black apothecia (fruiting bodies) which look like squashed flies!  The spores that are inside the black parts are in a small sack called an ascus.  Each spore has 3 walls  across it and looks like a little worm.  Different lichens have different looking spores so it helps to see them to give the lichen the correct species name.

Spores

Back in Berlin, I saw very few lichens, probably because of pollution.  I did however get a guided tour of the lichen Herbarium in the Botanic Gardens from Harrie Sipman, the curator. The Herbarium stores thousands (240,000) of samples of lichens from across the world. There were 3 large rooms in the basement kitted out with rolling banks of shelves.  Upon the shelves were brown boxes, labelled with a lichen name and arranged in alphabetical order.

Harrie and the collection

Inside each box are samples  of lichen, with information on where and when it was collected and by whom.

The picture shows the samples of a lichen called Anisomeridium albisedum. You can see that the handwritten name on the brown packet starts with Ditremis not Anisomeridium.  This is one of the hazards of lichen names - they keep changing them when something like DNA analysis shows that it should be renamed.  It must be a bit of a nightmare to have to relocate the box if the new name starts with a different letter!

The rooms are kept at a constant temperature and there are sprinklers in the ceiling which pump out nitrogen rather than water in case of fire.  In fact, flooding the room with nitrogen is a way to kill any bugs that may have got in there.  New specimens are put in a freezer for a week before they are allowed in, in order to kill any wildlife in the samples.

 I also have a small shoebox of lichens I have collected so I can try to identify them. I was rather amused to see that they had a whole shelf  labelled as below:

In other words, ones they couldn't identify!

As it was pouring with rain, we didn't walk round the rest of the  gardens but visited the glasshouses.  I enjoyed a series of aquaria which showed underwater plants.  The one with corals (and fish)  was stunning.

NPMS and toadstools - large and tiny

 In a post a couple of years ago I mentioned that I survey plots for a scheme called  the NPMS (the National Plant Monitoring Scheme).  You can read more about it on their website here. Ideally, the plots are surveyed every year, twice a year, and I have endeavoured to do that for the 8 years  since the scheme started.  There are 1,207 squares being monitored and  I was rather surprised to find that of the hundreds of volunteer surveyors only 40 have manged to send in data every year.  As I was one of them, I even got a mention in the 2022 Annual Report.  Probably the only bit of botanical fame I will ever have!

On my visit to my plot up on Craggan (a local hill) there were a few fungi that caught my eye.  I don't have names for them but could admire them, none the less.  The first was a tiny toadstool with frilly points:

The others that caught my eye were much bigger and more colourful.  The first one was  about 4 cm across and has really wide gills.  Maybe a waxcap?

The second group were much bigger. That's my boot for scale.

 Most of the fungi we notice have those big fruiting bodies we call mushrooms or toadstools.  The majority of the fungus is underground in a web called the mycelium.  The fruiting bodies are produced  to manufacture and distribute their spores.

In the last photo you can see there is a rock with white patches.  Those white patches are lichens.  It might surprise you to know that they are also fungi.  Lichens are fungi which also have another organism inside, usually an alga.  Lichens often have different fruiting bodies called apothecia which look like little jam tarts or wine gums growing on the lichen and have the job of manufacturing spores. However, there are some lichens which actually grow tiny toadstools and I spotted one on a rock on my way home.

This interesting lichen is only about 5cm across and looks like a green crust with some pinkish blobs.  It gets more interesting as you get closer and look at those pink blobs.

The pink blobs are the heads of teeny tiny mushrooms just a few millimetres tall!  They also have the job of producing spores. Once you have your eye in, this lichen (Baeomyces rufus) is quite common locally in shady dampish woodland.

Finally, from rather pleasing facets of nature, to a not so pleasant one from my garden.  You may have read in previous posts that I have the misfortune to have New Zealand Flatworms in my garden and I wage a constant war of attrition against them as they eat earthworms almost to the point of  extinction.  I shifted a pile of fencing planks and found plenty of NZ flatworms underneath and dozens of their eggs, which look like shiny blackcurrants.  Each egg has several baby worms inside.  One had just been laid and I think the white patch on the flatworm must be its egg laying opening as I have not seen this before (and believe me, I have seen hundreds of flatworms!).

A NZ flatworm and a fresh egg

To see a world in a grain of sand...

 As William Blake said, there is a wonderful world to be seen if you look closely at small things. I think this is part of my fascination with lichens - there is always something new to be seen if you look closely, preferably with a hand lens or microscope. And if you have a UV torch, the world becomes even more colourful.

Last month, I had lunch at a restaurant on the Beauly Firth, The Storehouse (I can recommend it!). It was a beautiful sunny calm day.

Beauly Firth shoreline

As always, I had a look for fallen twigs, just in case there were interesting lichens...

It all became much more spectacular under UV light.

The yellow lichen (Xanthoria parietina) fluoresces bright orange under UV.  Different chemicals in the lichen cause the fluorescence.  In this case the chemical is called "parietin" and acts as a sunscreen.  I don't know which came first, the name of the chemical or the name of the lichen. I have no idea what is causing the deep red fluorescence between the 2 orange patches, as there is nothing visible on the bark. The small patch of pale orange to the bottom right is a lichen called Lecidella eleochroma.

The array of grey lichens along the bottom of the branch are more difficult to name but I decided  it was about time I tackled these grey "jam tart" lichens which I have avoided so far.  I picked up another fallen branch by Loch Imrich. Here it is:

I decided to look at the patch of lichens just above 18 on the ruler.

The "jam tarts" I mentioned are the round structures with white margins - just like jam tarts with a jammy middle and a white pastry case. I could see 2 different lichens; on the left, brown jam tarts (apothecia) on a white background  and on the right, frosted jam tarts which looked as if they had icing sugar on them (it's called pruina botanically) with a yellow background. When I looked a bit further along there was a third tiny green lichen, only a few mm across.

 In my quest to find a name for these lichens, I measured them, noted the different colours and tested them by putting tiny drops of chemicals on then looking for any colour changes.  Then armed with a book by Dobson, tried to key them out - with no success! So no names at present. Looking at them  with the UV torch was interesting.

The bright yellow and turquoise patches are where I applied a small amount of chemical, usually abbreviated to K (though it is actually KOH, Potasssium hydroxide).  As none of the lichens looked orange under UV, this ruled out some IDs and I still can't name the lichens. I think I will need some help! But I enjoyed the investigation.

A very botanical weekend

The beautiful sunny weather last weekend was ideal for some botany activities I had planned. On the Saturday, I took a group of people from the Inverness Botany group up Glen Banchor to look at lichens.  Our first stop was an old dry stone wall by the first cattle grid.  This has so many different lichens on it that you could consider it as a lichen hunter's heaven - or hell - as it is covered in crustose species that I can't identify! I had picked out some of the easier ones to spot and put them on a help sheet:

 Even then, you have to get close up and personal when trying to see the features.

A hand lens, x10, or a little device that clips on your phone can really help you to see the details.

Here are two favourites (anything with blood in the name seems to be popular!):

Blood spot lichen (Ophioparma ventosa) growing on the stone wall

Bloody Heart Lichen (Mycoblastus sanguinarea) growing on a birch tree

The Bloody Heart Lichen has black fruits (apothecia) on it but when scratched, it is orangey-red underneath.  This is because you are exposing an  orange alga that coexists with the lichen  (Trentopohlia).  Most algae are green.  Lichens have (at least) two components: a fungus and an alga.  The fungus gives the lichen its name and provides a home for the alga. The alga produces food by photosynthesis.

On the Sunday, I joined in a Fungus Foray around Newtonmore with Prof Bruce Ing. I was amazed at how many fungi a discerning eye can spot.  There were over 50 around Loch Imrich! 

The undersides have a variety of gills and pores from which the spores fall. Apparently a fungus has to grow very accurately vertical as otherwise the spores would get stuck on the sides of the tubes etc when the spores are released!

Bruce also provided a different ID for the log pile fungus (post has been updated) as Lintneria trachyspora.

Bruce is an expert on Slime Moulds and Mildews and for the first time ever I was delighted that so many plants in my garden had mildew! Bruce took away lots of sample leaves, as apparently each family of plants has a different species of mildew ... who knew?

And finally, a visit to a friend's garden produced lots of sightings of butterflies, so here is one I have not shown before. A Peacock (Inachis io). The caterpillars feed on nettles, and the adult butterflies overwinter in sheds and outhouses.