#trentepohlia

[lichenaday]

Hymenelia epulotica

Field work is going really slooow at the moment, so of course I am using the time wisely to catch up on my journal reading, organize my folders, get ahead on my grant writing, and make blog posts, right? Yes, I am totally doing that, and not zoning out watching hours of mind-numbing medical dramas and playing addictive cell phone games to dull the huge amounts of anxiety I have about getting my work done. That's totally not what's happening. Anyway, here's a lichen! H. epulotica is one of those lichens that looks completely different in every picture I find of it online. Likely this is because the name actually represents a complex of closely related species that still require proper delimitation, but you know, that takes time and money, something we in the scientific community struggle with on the reg. What I can tell you is that this is a crustose lichen that grows with its smooth or cracked thallus sunken into the surface of moist, calciferous rocks. It varies in color, but typically has a pink-orange cast to it due to its trentepohlioid (a red-orange species) algal photobiont. Its apothecia start out immersed in the thallus, but later become sessile (sitting on the surface), and have a concave to flat pink to pale brown disc. You can find H. epulotica in cool arctic-alpine regions of the northern hemisphere. Like where I am right now . . . totally using my time super well . . .

images: source | source | source

info: source | source | source

[cedar-glade]

  Trentepohlia umbrina, high up in the Mt. airy valley black walnut, Cincinnati, Ohio.

I see three pretty common lichens on this tree but I was not actually trying to photograph any of these despite getting some good shots of one Lecanora hybocarpa complex lichen. aka bumpy rim lichen. Which I actually wanted to use as scale for the size of what I really wanted to take pics of.

Instead I was trying to photograph this beautiful red streak because I feel like often it is over looked and under appreciated from a botanical and mycological perspective, often even assumed to be part of woody material on red oaks as cork or lenticil tissue.

There is a niche group of semi complex crack species and exposed surface species of filimentous algae, actinomycetes, and cyanobacteria that make up a good portion of tree bark biota that we don’t often get taught about despite many of them being directly associated as a functional group(photobiont) of many lichen species. In this case, subaerial algae is the noted or deamed group type, this one on Black Walnut bark high up in the canopy is a filimentous chlorophyte...

 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Examples-of-subaerial-habitats-and-algae-on-and-in-plants-A-Thin-film-of-green-algae_fig15_280577788

specifically the carotenoid rich Trentepohlia spp., Most species of Trentepohlia species are generalistic, even pollip clustering or forming long elongated hairs that are free standing and grow on rocks and trees freely depending on moisture and mineral contents. Some are directly associated with parasitism or within’ lichen as a mutualist coevolved as photobiont. 

Most species are pretty dang hard to Identify, resulting in utilizing microscopy or sequencing in order to resolve a taxa delineation.

Here, pictured above, is a very small species of bark dwelling caespitose (mat forming) relatively as prostrate as possible( growing non erect and almost adhering to the surface.) The good ol’ fashion algae is easy to get a sample of and put under a scope free floating in water, once done look at the filimentous grouping, linear psuedoseptae with elongated cells in conjunction with the roles of plasmodesmata for cytoplasmic streaming is not what I saw, instead I got adjacent rounded blobs forming the filamentous line with most of the pigment filing the cells. So matted dark red tree balls is what I viewed, Trentepohilia umbrina. The interesting thing is that this species is very small and while preferring exposure/barren niche like many Trentepohilia spp. do; we see this species in shaded cracks and crevices more than in zones of full exposure. Hence why umbrina may have been selected as epithet. ( within the shadows)

The most common species and easiest to ID are:

Trentepohlia abietina ( a small polip cluster forming tree only species) often associated with elongated cell structure. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/44841106)

Trentepohlia aurea Orange rock hair (the only species with an english common name that I am aware of) most of the other species only seem to have dutch, norwegian , russian, siberian, or native american first nation (inuit, metis, Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh) names. This species is huge and easy to see the hairy polip clusters.

Trentepohlia jolithus , a true nordic and beringian species limited to high volcanic regions in the northern hemisphere and very bright and prostrate forming dense mats on rocks appearing as a film

  Trentepohlia umbrina , or as I call it, matted on bark dark red tree balls clustered as a filamentous line, https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/410587-Trentepohlia-umbrina/browse_photos  This is what you see under obs scope, If you

Other common species but with no accessibility as far as ID delineation are these:

Trentepohlia flava , a coastal salt mist generalist species often found along the western coast of North America on rocks but also commonly found in europe near sea side areas in the north, while this doesn’t fully explain it’s locality niche or fix any range maps because we really don’t know if it has a cosmopolitain range or not and already a var. complex has formed along with range divisions.

https://www.proquest.com/openview/7f3a8e73a75fb8212470443aa189452c/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=37953.

The rest of these species in the genus are very inaccessible without ITIS or a lab to access.

[evilblunt27]

[entomologize]

The painted lichen moth, with its host "plants": the terrestrial algae Trentepohlia aurea and the lichens Cladonia polycarpoides and Physcia millegrana. Part of my host plant series!

[postleft]

major breakthrough in the lichen research today: found out about Irpex (non-lichen genus), terrestrial algae (especially Trentepohlia) and Anisomeridium polypori. something to look forward to!

[mushroomgay]

Barnet, London, UK, February 2018

Top: phanerochaete chrysosporium, a purple crust fungus. Bottom: trentepohlia sp., an orange terrestrial algae.

[aforeigna]

A M B E R _________ m e d i t a t i o n . #rock #colour #algae #trentepohlia #ns #curioustraveler #vscocam (at Jongensfontein, Western Cape, South Africa)

[bio-child]

The red moss is a green algae called Trentepohlia

[greypixelphoto]

[gbwnatureblog]

Graphis scripta, the script lichen, so-called because the narrow, curved, often forked, apothecia (spore producing bodies) look like runes or other writing. This species grows on the smooth bark of hardwood trees and is very abundant over much of the eastern United States and southern Canada around the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence River. Graphis scripta also occurs from Mexico north Oregon, USA to British Columbia, Canada and Alaska. In Europe it is found in Scandinavia, the UK and most continental European countries.

The apothecia in this group of lichens, which includes several other species and genera and broadly known as “script lichens”, are called “lirellae”. The word lireallae is from the Latin for “furrows” in reference to the furrowed or channeled appearance of the spore producing bodies.

The body of Graphis scripta is a thin grayish crust that is almost completely immersed into the bark substrate. The specimen above is growing on black ash (Fraxinus nigra) and is in typical form. By the way, the lichen in that photo is about 5 times larger than in life. Below is a photo of one at a more normal scale and also on black ash.

Lichens are symbiotic combinations of a fungus and one or more photosynthetic organisms (an algae and/or cyanobacteria) collectively called “photobionts”. Photobionts detected in Graphis scripta are the algae Printzina lagenifera and Trentepohlia umbrina, both in the green algae family Trentepohliaceae. Species of Trentepohlia can sometimes be found growing freely on the bark of trees or on damp rocks and are red or orange. The photo below is of a free-living Trentepohlia species on paper birch. To properly identify it requires careful microscopic examination (a subject for a future post).

References

Consortium of North American Lichen Herbaria (Graphis scripta)

Keys to the Lichens of Minnesota. Clifford Wetmore (revised 2005)

Lichens of North America. Irwin M. Brodo, Sylvia Duran Sharnoff, and Stephen Sharnoff (2001). Published by Yale University Press

New insights into diversity and selectivity of trentepohlialean lichen photobionts from the extratropics. Christina Hametner, Elfriede Stocker-Wörgötter, and Martin Grube. Symbiosis. Vol. 63:31-40 (2014).

Phylogentic Diversity of Trentepohlianean Algae Associated with Lichen-Forming Fungi. Matthew P. Nelson, Eimy Rivas Plata, Carrie J. Andrew, Robert Lucking, and H. Thornsten Lumbsh. Journal of Phycology. Vol. 47: 282-290 (2011).

Prinzia lagenifera coll. (Trentepohliales, Chlorophyta) epiphyllous in a boreal forest. Harri Harmaja. Annale Botanici Fennici. Vol 48:129-132 (2011).

Ways of Enlichenment (Graphis)

[lichenaday]

Porina leptalea

How are we supposed to discover all the mysterious, unknown lichens out there when they go around being all tiny and inconspicuous like this? Well it's hard, let me tell ya. P. leptalea has a thin, filmy, crustose thallus that is typically gray-green, olive, or brown in color--perfect for blending in with the shady bark and rock it likes to grow on. Often it is little more than a conglomeration of Trentepohlia algal cells held together by teeny-tiny fungal hyphae. It produces perithecia, which are flask-shaped, spore-producing fruiting bodies with a small, pore-like opening. These perithecia are tiny, rounded and slightly raised, and dull orange or red-brown in color. P. leptalea can be found in humid sub-tropical or temperate locations, but the extent of its range isn't really known since it is so hard to find and ID! It's amazing how much life is crammed into every little corner of this world that we don't notice. Worlds within worlds, life within life, worlds within life . . . just tiny dudes everywhere.

images: source | source | source | source

info: source | source | source | source

[halomancer]

Fuck you it’s time for Trentepohlia

[joqatana]

Neither a slime mold nor s lichen nor a fungus: Found at Pacific Grove on a Monterey Cypress:

“Trentepohlia aurea is a species of filamentous terrestrial green alga with a worldwide distribution. It grows on rocks, old walls and the trunks and branches of trees such as oaks and the Monterey cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) where the tree occurs in coastal central California. The orange coloration results from carotenoid pigments in the algal cells.”

.

[unkn0wnvariable]

Orange Trunk - Sunlight bringing out the bright orange colour of the trentepohlia algae covering this tree trunk, in Brampton Wood on 25th May 2019. (I'm not even going to try to ID the exact species of algae.) https://flic.kr/p/2goLMjk

[naturetakarazuka]

This might be Trentepohlia sp.

I don’t have enough information on this algae, just feel beautiful