_Wendy Bedggood_
Saturday 10th July turned out to be a wild weather day and with warnings to “not shelter under trees’ this activity was shifted to the Wartook café. Ewen had a large board with lots of photos he had taken of fungi found in the local area, he also had several books, including the Fungimap book to which he contributed photos. Spore patterns can help with identification of fungi and Ewen had prepared some for us to look at. These were fungi which were placed gill side down on newsprint (which was black and white) then left overnight so the spores shed. The colour and pattern of the spores could easily be seen and quite fascinating to observe.
We also talked about lichens which took me back to the 70’s when I had a collection and was studying them as one of my projects. Lichens are formed by a symbiotic relationship between a fungi (usually an ascomycete) and an algae usually a green or a blue-green algae. They have a distinctive look and after a while you can easily tell the difference between a lichen and a fungi. Some of our lichen species are found only in Australia but many are found here and other countries.
There are three main growth forms of lichens. The foliose group resemble a leafy structure and may have thread like structures on the underside which appear to attach them to the soil, bark or surface they are growing on. The fruticose group tend to be a lot more three dimensional and typical examples are ‘old mans beard’ growing on branches and ‘coral lichen’ you may see lying loosely on the ground. The third group are crustose and they are closely appressed to the surface they are growing on and cannot be separated from it, an example are those blobs on rocks which look like birds droppings or bits of paint. These growth forms alone are not enough to key out lichens as the lichens of one family or even one genus may belong to all three groups. A number of characteristics are taken into account when trying to name lichens including chemical tests. As each species produces its own unique chemical substances, these chemical tests are sometimes the deciding factor between species A or species B. More involved methods such as crystal tests and chromatography are also used. However most lichen keys just use physical characteristics and occasionally chemical tests to get to genus level, then physical and chemical tests to get to species level. Of course like all groups of plants they have their own vocabulary and when starting out, one is continually referring to the glossary to work through the key. Never the less these are a fascinating group of plants and well worth having a look at under a hand lens or dissecting microscope.