I had a great day yesterday, beginning with another attempt for the Humpback Whale in Loch Dunvegan (no joy once again, I really do think it's moved on elsewhere) before dropping in to what used to be Dunvegan Woods before it was felled last year. I've only ever known this as a dark, dank hillside hidden beneath the dense cover of a mature conifer plantation, this was my first visit since the felling and it was something of an eye-opener. It still very much resembles a disaster zone, which I guess it was for the trees and everything dependent upon them and their humid shade. A few tenacious Hard-ferns and Foxgloves remained, providing a vague clue as to the lost habitat. Plus the less subtle clue of a few thousand tree stumps. But almost everything else, including the carpets of mosses, has died off. Killed by a lack of humidity and the wind, I expect.
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| Visibility, on a bright day, used to be about 100ft in any given direction |
A few rises and falls of hillsides later, I left behind the decimated plantation and entered Dunvegan Estate lands, still gloriously dark, dank and full of life. I spotted a substantial resin run on one particularly large tree (no idea which species, the branches were very far above me) and wondered if any resinicolous fungi might be present. I was in luck...
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| Typical type of resin run that hosts resinicolous fungi |
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| The pale yellowy-orange fruiting bodies of Sarea resinae |
Sarea resinae only occurs on old resin runs. Resin is a pretty inhospitable place to live, full of various chemicals designed to inhibit bacterial and fungal growth. And yet Sarea resinae manages very well. In wet and warmer conditions Sarea resinae deepens in colour to a lovely warm amber and the discs themselves swell and become softer, today they were in their cold midwinter-mode, pale and hardened.
Through my handlens I suddenly noticed some smaller, black fruit bodies. I remembered that a second species of Sarea occurs on resin runs, one which is far less commonly recorded. I squinted some more and was happy that what I was seeing was a smaller, all black version of Sarea resinae. I took some pics, knowing that this was a fungus I had never encountered before. They weren't great...
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| Behold! Each black 'cup' is about half a millimetre in diameter, maybe less |
This is Sarea difformis, a rarely recorded fungus (can't think why...) and the winter months seem to be the most profitable time of year to go searching for it. Remember, it only occurs on old resin runs. My thoughts are that if you find the more obvious orange fruiting bodies of Sarea resinae, look a little closer and you may find its smaller, less visible cousin growing right alongside.
Sarea difformis is a new species for me, and when I added it to my PSL I discovered that it is, in fact, a new species for the entire website! No other pan-species lister has recorded this fungus (and there are plenty of folk with a larger fungi list than I). That's cool, between us we have a lot of angles covered, yet there's always room for additional species to sneak in.
I continued through the woods, finding what I took to be a patch of False Londonpride in the undergrowth. There are a couple of confirmed False Londonpride populations already known from Skye, one of which is just a few miles down the road. I picked a sample and took it with me to the known Edinbane population for a side-by-side comparison. They matched, though the Dunvegan plants are a little more hairy than the Edinbane plants.
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| False Londonpride, here at its third known Skye site |
I carried on towards Skeabost Bridge next, where for the first time in a very long while I took my sieve and tray out of the boot and put them to use. I sieved a few Molinia tussocks without much success. I targeted tussocks that were growing in wet areas, my thoughts being that invertebrates would have taken refuge in these tussocks as the surrounding lands became inundated with standing water after all the rains we've had lately. A month ago this may have been a good tactic, but we've had a few mild days lately and the standing groundwater/snow has all gone now. What I did find very productive though was sieving big handfuls of mosses that were growing over rocks and stumps. I missed a few exciting looking flies that departed the tray quicker than I could poot them, but a reasonable selection of small beetles, spiders, springtails and millipedes went up the pooter's tube. Later that evening I went through the specimens and was amazed to discover that thirty minutes of sieving had given me a small haul of lifers, namely the beetles Stenus latifrons, Perapion violaceum (a bit overdue that one, to be fair), the stunning Reichenbachia juncorum rocking in at 1.5mm of weirdness, Olophrum fuscum and the spider Poeciloneta variegata which I actually knocked from Gorse. Alongside those were Stenus impressus with its tibial spurs, the ensign scale Arctorthezia cataphracta, the springtails Dicyrtomina saundersi and Pogonognathellus longicornis, plus a lively micromoth which I'm calling Caloptilia elongella even though the experts say it can only be reliably differentiated from Caloptilia betulicola by dissecting out the genitalia. I went by the colour of the hind coxae and femora, coupled with the grey-brown colour of the scales on the underside of the forewing, seemingly a good character. Luckily Ghostie is a moth gen detter par excellence and has offered to chop its bits for me. I bet it turns out to be elongella though.
Heading back for the hotel, I realised that there was still enough daylight in the sky for me to hit one last site. I chose nearby Greshornish Forestry, some five miles of tracks through young plantation. It's a pretty wet site and there are drainage ditches either side of the track. I noted how Bulbous Rush seems to love the bare earth of spoil heaps created when the ditches were dug out
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| If this keeps on proliferating exponentially, I expect it to have taken over the world by 2027 |
I continued along the tracks for quite some way before a patch of Selfheal caught my eye. It was covered in black 'splash marks' and at first glance that is exactly what they appeared to be. Except none of the neighbouring Ribwort Plantain, Procumbent Pearlwort or White Clover had splash marks on them. I looked a bit closer, intrigued as to what I was seeing
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| Not splash marks, that's for sure |
I popped a sample into a pot and took it away with me for further investigation. Continuing along the tracks I saw plenty more infected Selfheal plants, weirdly many of them were growing right alongside uninfected plants. It soon started to grow dimmer, the days are slowly lengthening but it is still midwinter and there's a very long way to go until the simmer dim. As I headed back towards the car, a vocal flock of Crossbills flew overhead, my first of the year.
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| As viewed down the barrel of my microscope |
Apothecia 1-2mm diam., dark brown to black, in small groups seated on mats of radiating black hyphae which envelop stem leaves and cover some of the lower leaves of plants growing on paths and rides in woodlands. Jan-May.
If that isn't a perfect description of the habitat I was walking, then I don't know what is. I scraped a bit onto a microscope slide and whacked it beneath my compound microscope. No sign of any spores just yet, I shall try again in a month's time.
Jumping back onto the PSL site to add my SIXTH lifer of the day, I was somewhat amused to see that nobody else has recorded Leptotrochila prunellae on their lists. So that's two lots of black fungal dots I've seen today that nobody else on the PSL site has ever seen. This doesn't mean I'm 'better' than anybody else, it just means that I'm looking at things that others aren't. Or if they are, they aren't bothering to follow them up with an identity. These six additions put my PSL on 7315 species, but perhaps more importantly they put the overall species count of all pan-species listers up to 29,333 species. That's incredible! Pan-species listing is fast becoming a powerful movement. It's not about the individual, that's just crass. PSL is about the combined knowledge and might of the whole.
But it's also about black dots, ideally sub-millimetre ones that nobody else has ever seen :)
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