The Frozen North

The weather has turned bitter of late. First we were severely thumped by Storm Caroline, though thankfully we didn't lose power or roofs this time. Then we had hail, followed by snow for a couple of days. But today it dawned bright and calm. Well, I'm assuming it did. I didn't actually wake up until after 9am and it was certainly bright and calm by then. Still some snow on the ground but fading fast, I grabbed my hat and headed up the hill towards the bog area. I wanted to gather some more samples and have another look for microscopic algae. Unfortunately, I hadn't really thought it through too well

Right. I might just leave the aquatic sampling for some other time...

Still, the view across the bay was really rather pleasant

I have a brand new camera, an Olympus TG-4 which should outperform my battered two year old £70 jobbie. It has several settings I like the look of, including an image-stacking option on the close-up setting which could come in very useful for photographing lichens, mosses, inverts, flowers etc. I was keen to try it out so headed for the cemetery with its lichen-festooned walls and headstones.

None of these images have been manipulated whatsoever, not cropped or adjusted, just straight off the card unaltered. I'll change from JPEG to RAW next time, JPEG seems to soften everything. I used the image stacking option for a greater depth of field and chose subjects that receded away from the camera lens. I'd have spent a bit longer composing slightly more interesting backgrounds, but my fingers were raw from the icy cold wind - I definitely should have brought gloves!

Not too shabby for first attempts

I was keen to get out of the wind, so hustled down into the woods for shelter and some bryophyte action. The bryophyte workshop earlier this week has inspired me to tackle the little bastar beauties once more, though I've decided to change my methods for collecting them. Usually I grab a couple of dozen samples, pot them up individually, fail to identify the first couple and throw the rest in the bin. From now on I think I'm just going to take four or five examples and really try to key them through properly. Which is exactly what I did today. 

Dicranum majus - a nice easy one with leaf length of well over 10mm

Dicranum majus is a lifer for me, despite it being common as muck across the wooded slope between the A87 and the cemetery. The large size rules out others in the genus. We keyed this one through at the bryophyte workshop, but I certainly wasn't about to lifetick someone else's moss that they'd brought in a pot! This was my first lifer of the day. 

Pogonatum altoides - check out the calyptra on that!

Acrocarpous mosses produce a spore-laden capsule which is normally raised above the leafy parts on a long stalk called a seta. This capsule often has a protective covering called a calyptra, visible here as the (rather blurry) pale things projecting out above the greenery. These are what caught my eye and drew my attention to the moss beneath. A closer look revealed the leaves to be thickened and opaque, unlike most mosses which have leaves only one cell thick. My time at the bryophyte workshop served me well, I knew this was probably a Polytrichum. Once indoors I whacked the leaf under the microscope, noting the chlorophyll-free basal cells and thick green laminar cells covering the rest of the leaf apart from a narrow border maybe 2 or 3 cells wide that ran around the outer margin. Really quite distinctive! The uppermost part of the leaf was toothed, several cells per tooth whilst the capsule itself was papillose (covered in minute bobbles) which ruled out a close lookalike. All of this allowed me to key it through to Pogonatum aloides which used to be in the genus Polytrichum, so I was almost right!

Margin of leaf composed of a layer of single cells, everything else covered in laminar cells several rows deep

Bird's eye view of the calyptra. If a bird was looking down from above, that is.

Plagiothecium undulatum sprawling across a rotten log

This great big beast of a moss is Plagiothecium undulatum, one that I've recorded from here before. It's pretty darn distinctive, with those long, pale "rat tails" draped across rotting logs on the upper slopes of Uig Woods. Nice thing really. 

That should be pretty easy to key through! 

Yep, it certainly was too. This from the BBS key. "Pleurocarps with leaves strongly curved or turned downwards or to one side" Couplet 1 - stems red, robust, rigid, irregularly pinnately branched - Rhytidiadelphus loreus. Ha, nailed it at the first couplet! It looks even better under the microscope. This proved to be my third new moss of the morning. 

Again, looks fairly obvious (do I detect a trend...)

This one turned out to be Neckera complanata, though without the stringy thread-like shoots it's supposed to have. Microscopic examination of the shape of the cells in different parts of the leaf helped clinch the identity. I thought I'd seen this before, but apparently not, hence this was my fourth new moss of the morning! Deciding to quit mosses whilst I was ahead, I wandered down to Shore Woods and found a couple of microfungi I didn't recognise. 

First up was a rather boring leafspot on Foxglove which was Ascochyta moelleriana (not molleriana as Ellis & Ellis spell it) followed by a much nicer looking thing on Primrose leaves

Phyllosticta primulicola colony on underside of infected Primrose leaf

The upperside of the Primrose leaf exhibited a distinct yellowish patch, it was this that initially caught my eye. This bad boy was all over the underside of those yellow patches. Note that it actually holes the infected tissue too. I've never knowingly seen this fungus before, so that's a total of six lifers today! It reminded me of the microfungus that occurs on Herb-Robert, though that occurs on the upper surface of the leaf, not the underside. I had a quick search until I found some

A particularly heavy infection of Coleroa robertiana on Herb-Robert

LATE NIGHT UPDATE: managed to grab the tiniest sample of bog water whilst I was up there. A quick peek through the microscope at midnight revealed many of these beautiful things

I've yet to look at them properly, but I suspect I have several species of Micrasterias. I think they may include M.rotata, M.denticulata and M.thomasiana, but I'm going to have to wait until tonight before having a proper look at them. Glorious wee things though!


So there you have it. Nearly four months of nothing followed by two blogposts in three days. Yes folks, I'm officially back! Bookmark this page, I expect to see you back here again soon.