Arran and Arms

Partway through April, my husband and I joined a group from the British lichen society on Arran for a few days of lichen hunting. Although my husband is quite happy for me to go lichen hunting, he spent his time cycling. The weather was rather unpredictable resulting in our ferry from Ardrossan being cancelled with an hour’s notice and deferred for two days to 7 o’clock in the morning. After the initial panic, we managed to drive to Troon and get an alternative ferry, with a sigh of relief. We were very fortunate has the ferry after that was cancelled as well, and some people had to wait until the following day to get over.

 

As most of you will know, Arran is an island on the West Coast of Scotland. Although small, it has a range of interesting habitats from a mountain, Goat Fell, to plenty of coastline and Glens. Each habitat has a different selection of lichens, and I particularly enjoyed the coastal visit to Kildonan which included dinosaur footprints in the rock. 

I am not familiar with coastal lichens as Newtonmore is a long way from the sea but there was a big expanse of Dermatocarpon miniatum on the boulders where water ran down. I don't know why it is called miniatum as the lobes weren't mini at all, being over an inch across. There was another species of Dermatocarpon in my last post which again was in a place where water ran down the rocks.

 

Another visit was to an old graveyard. Graveyards are very popular with lichenologists because the gravestones are made of different rocks and lichens have their own preferences for the acidity or alkalinity of the rock they grow on. This means that you get a good range of species in a small area.

Noses to the gravestone!

 On returning to Newtonmore, I went for a walk along the Spey to advise on where they might put wildflower information boards. It is bit early for flowers on the Wildcat trail down by the Spey but there were some interesting fungi.

A morel

One was a morel with a contorted top and the other was a  puzzle until I got home and could look it up.

Moon Poop

 Apologies for the awful picture but there were two large hand size white blobs on an old Alder tree. On touching one, it had a skin but was squishy inside. A bit like custard that had set in the jug.  Research revealed that it was not a fungus but a slime mould, Reticularia lycoperdon or False Puffball or even better, Moon Poop! I had plans to go back and take pictures when it had developed more and produced spores but as you will find out in a moment this was not to be.

 The next day I went to a meeting in Strathpeffer of the HBRG, the Highland biological recording group and heard some interesting talks about beetles. There was a speaker called Ashleigh Whiffin who is a curator of the insect collection at the National Museums of Scotland. Ash loves her carrion beetles and gave a really interesting talk. She has a YouTube video available here. Carrion beetles bury little corpses and use them to feed their young.  After the meeting I went to do some shopping in Inverness and had a bit of a disaster when I tripped on an uneven paver in the car park and broke my arm. I am attempting to dictate this blog post but hope I will be able to type again in a few weeks.

Extreme lichening

 Over Easter I was lucky to have some of my family staying and we went for a walk to the Falls of Truim.   The Truim  runs through a gorge and has plenty of places to swim but we were on a lichen hunt rather than braving the chilly waters.

We had been swimming last year when it was a lot warmer. I had found some interesting lichens and had been asked to collect some samples next time I went there. I probably won't be visiting the site very often as the access is quite steep and I was glad of company (and the rope) to lend a hand!

The path alongside the gorge had  green areas alongside the pine roots - here it is with a size 9 shoe for scale:

You really need to get down close and peer at them before the green patches get interesting.

There are lots of pink blobs (apothecia) which have earned this lichen the nick name of "Fairy puke" Maybe some of you remember the Billy Connolly joke about carrots.... For those of you with a tender constitution it is officially known as Icmadophila ericetorum.

This wasn't the lichen I was looking for, though it was good to see it. The one I wanted was down by the edge of the river as it likes a bit of wet.

The ruler is in centimetres. The rock face is flushed with water from the slope above, and that is just the sort of habitat that this lichen (Dermatocarpon intestiniforme) likes. It goes a sludgy green when wet which distinguishes it from an almost identical lichen called Dermatocarpon luridum  which goes bright green - but I have yet to find that one. 

Once we were back at the top we went for a gentle walk in the woods and my daughter-in-law spotted a tiny interesting fungus. It is called Earpick fungus and the stalk is on one side of the cap (rather than the middle) and the whole thing is covered with bristles and grows on pine cones.

Earpick fungus (Auriscalpium vulgare)

Even the underneath of the cap is covered in tiny teeth. I assume the spores get shot out of those black tips.

When I looked at it under the microscope I found we had brought a tiny fly back as well, only about 2mm long. Stephen Moran kindly checked some photos and identified it as Trioza urticae, which is a Psillid (jumping plant louse).  Maybe not the most attractive of descriptions!

The mystery fly on the edge of the earpick fungus

Here's what Stephen said:

They overwinter away from the hosts, usually in conifers (they love Sitka spruce) and are now just venturing out and about again. They often pop up on house or car windows this time of year. 

On the way back we went past a pile of stones at the edge of a field - just look at all those lovely lichens.  I won't be able to resist going back for a closer look!

The lichenologists equivalent of a sweetie shop!

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Teabags and Halophytes

 More on the mystery parcel... it is part of a research project  to investigate halophytes.  Halophytes are plants that can cope with salt so they can grow by the sea or increasingly they have spread to the sides of salted roads.  Some have reached Newtonmore which is 45 miles from the coast, presumably from seeds in car tyres and carried on the wind. Here are the details of the current project:

I will be collecting some of the plants in Newtonmore and further afield if I see them.  If you want to help out, I'm sure Christopher would be pleased to hear from you (email above).  The plants are only just appearing so it is not too late to volunteer.  The parcel he sends you contains the materials for collecting, drying and logging your plant samples.

Another plant that is spreading, probably in car tyre treads is  Mossy Stonecrop (Crassula tilleaea).  It used to classed as scarce, and was missing from much of Britain as shown in the map below.

It appeared in North East Scotland and is making its way inland.  I found it in 2019 in the car park at the Folk Museum in Newtonmore.

Mossy Stonecrop (the red plants)

It is a succulent with fleshy leaves, and can grow from broken off parts.  Given that it is in the car park, it almost certainly arrived in a tyre tread.  It is easy to spot as although it is tiny, it is bright red so if you see it locally, let me know.

Some interesting arrivals!

Frog spawn has appeared in my pond this week. The first batch  arrived on the night of Friday 15th March. Last year (2023) it was 20th March, and 6th April in 2022.  So this is the earliest I have seen it in my pond.

 The post has also brought some interesting arrivals.  One was a book called Mountain Flowers by Alan R Walker.

I am in the process of arranging for a second edition of Wildflower Walks around Newtonmore, and I contacted Alan as I refer to his book in the preface.  He then very kindly posted me a printed copy of his book, which has been completely revised for 2024.  The file of the book is freely available from Alan's website:

https://www.alanrwalker.com/mountain-flowers/

So go and visit and pick up your free copy!

You might wonder why a book on mountain flowers is relevant for Newtonmore... well, as Newtonmore is at 250m above sea level,  many of our flowers appear in Alan's book.  There is a page for each flower with a photo, a drawing, a distribution map and other useful information - more than you get in most flower books that don't have the room to go into each species in depth. Here's an example page.

So do go and visit Alan's website and get yourself a copy.  As a science writer by trade, Alan writes well and you will enjoy reading some of the other material on his site.

There was a reason for picking the page on Scurvygrass as it relates to the second parcel I received.  Here are the contents of the parcel:

Why on earth would someone from the University of Edinburgh send me:

• 5 plastic bags containing approximately 50g orange silica gel beads each
• 1 plastic bag containing:
• 15 empty paper tea bags
• 1 spare tea bag containing 15 paper clips
• 1 spare tea bag containing 15 small index cards
• Postage of £3.49 — enough to cover shipping the package back with second class small parcel service (please reuse the packaging if possible)
• 1 archival ink pen

(Who knew you could buy empty tea bags?) It is a science project about Danish Scurvy Grass and I will explain more in my next blog post.  If you are unsure what Danish Scurvy Grass looks like, check out this previous blog post  See you next time!

Plastic fantastic

 I mentioned in my last post that I had plans to investigate a sheet of black plastic that I had acquired while helping friends move house. Here it is again with a ruler for scale:

Looking at the cover of lichens, there are three kinds.  The flat round patches are crustose lichens. Here is one in detail:

Lecidella elaeochroma - a crustose lichen

I had seen this lichen before on trees but it looked quite different on  the plastic.  Just above it on the photos is a leafy or foliose lichen.  This is a tiny little Physcia species. There are other foliose lichens on the plastic that form leafy rosettes. Finally, the lichens that stick up like small bushes are called fruticose lichens.

Lecidella elaeochroma has the handy property of glowing bright orange in UV light which is a big help with identification. Here is a picture of it on an elm trunk.

Lecidella elaeochroma glowing orange under UV on an elm trunk.

Confusingly, on the plastic it glowed yellow rather than orange which made me doubt whether it was Lecidella elaeochroma, but further investigation confirmed it was. I also got confirmation from a lichen expert called Brian Coppins who was visiting me. A lovely man who is very generous with his time and expertise.

He took a look at my piece of black plastic and immediately pointed out a lichenicolous fungus (i.e. a fungus that grows on lichen) with the unpronounceable name of Zyzygomyces physciacearum. 

 Zyzygomyces physciacearum on Physcia

The lichenicolous fungus (let's just say LF) takes up home  on the lichen of its choice and proceeds to change how the lichen grows, producing lumps and bumps that spread the fungus.

The warty lumps and bumps of the LF

I've not investigated this one yet, but I did look more closely on the other lichens and found some more LFs.  One produced a big (well, big for a lichen!) 4mm balloon like growth called a gall on a different lichen.  

I cut it open and it was hollow inside.

The white strands are hyphae, the name for strands of fungus.  The black dots are part of the LF where it can produce spores.  Unfortunately, this one had not produced enough spores for me to identify it.

I had more luck with a different LF where the circular black bits had made some spores.

The spores are inside tube-like sacs called asci with 8 spores in each.  The picture looks blue because I used fountain pen ink to stain the sample which makes it easier to see.  There was enough detail to identify this LF as Lichenochora galligena and it was on Physcia aipoliae.  Thanks go to Brian Coppins for confirming the ID.

These LF are rather tricky and I think I will go back to "normal" lichens for the time being as there is plenty for me to learn there. 

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.

An Icy New Year

 New Year's Day was clear and frosty so I went for a walk on the Wildcat Trail along the Spey - mainly just for the walk, but I thought I would keep an eye out for any flowering plants for the New Year Plant Hunt.  I found not a single plant in flower....

I did see other things to admire though.  Some stunning views of the snowy hills:

The Cairngorms from Newtonmore Golf Course

 Some attractive ice patterns in the puddles:

Icy puddles

And for the first time, some Hair ice.

Hair Ice on a rotting log

Hair ice looks like white candyfloss.  There is a lot of information about it at the Met office site  here. They say it only forms in particular conditions: high humidity, a temperature below 0 °C and on rotten wood from a broad-leafed tree, and usually only between latitudes of 45°N  to 55°N (though Newtonmore is at 57°N). It looks like lots of very thin fibres made of ice.

If you put some in your hand, it melts away to water.  A man called Alfred Wegener suggested that it was linked to a specific fungus, though he did not know which one.  He had other good ideas as he discovered continental drift.  In 2015, 3 scientists proved him right and linked the formation of hair ice to a fungus called Exidiopsis effusa.

You can see a timelapse video of hair ice growing here.