Friday 9 December 2016

Small and perhaps a bit Too Colourful

Phlebia radiata, Wrinkled Crust.  Hayes Common, 16 November 2016.
Phlebia radiata, Wrinkled Crust.  Hayes Common, 16 November 2016.
There's a lot of this Wrinkled Crust around this year, on dead broadleaved trees of various species.  If you look at this photo:

Pond on Hayes Common, 23 November 2016.
Pond on Hayes Common, 23 November 2016.
You can just about see orange markings on that trunk in the foreground.  So despite the bright colour, they are not all that conspicuous.

On the same trunk are some other small, colourful fungi.

Ascocoryne sarcoides or Ascocoryne cylichnium.  Pond on Hayes Common, 23 November 2016.
Ascocoryne sarcoides or Ascocoryne cylichnium.  Pond on Hayes Common, 23 November 2016.
There are two Ascocoryne species that can't be separated without a microscope.  While looking at this photo, you can also see a black "bootlace" of the sort that Honey Fungi (Armillaria species) use to spread - very effectively - from tree to tree and along a trunk.

Calocera cornea, Small Stagshorn.  Dacromyces stillatus, Common Jellyspot, in the background.
Pond on Hayes Common, 25 November 2016.
Also on that trunk, two orange fungi,one small and the other tiny.  Small Stagshorn is easy to see when you get close, but the little orange blobs of Common Jellyspot are harder to see unless they crowd together in bigger clumps than this.

A short distance away, on a stump which was actually in the water, was this:

Unidentified Myxomycete.  Hayes Common, 13 November 2016.
Unidentified Myxomycete.  Hayes Common, 13 November 2016.
Slightly blurred because it was out of reach of a steady hand-held photo.  This is a slime mould or Myxomycete, not a fungus.  They are even more ephemeral than fungi, fruiting and dying back in a couple of days.   I have not been able to identify these purple blobs on stalks.

This is another slime mould:

Myxomycete.  Trichia species.  Hayes Common, 18 November 2016.
Myxomycete.  Trichia species.  Hayes Common, 18 November 2016.
It looks like an immature Trichia.  All these species like it wet - well, damp anyway.  In this particular hollow they certainly have it that way.  If you compare the photo above with the one in the previous post taken a few days earlier, you will see that the water level has risen noticeably.  The Inkcaps featured in that post are now under water, as is the stump on which I saw both of these slime moulds.

In fact .. here is the same hollow in February 2014:

Pond on Hayes Common, 9 February 2014.
Pond on Hayes Common, 9 February 2014.
Taken from the same angle, but from higher up, for obvious reasons.

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