#pseudocyphellaria

Pseudocyphellaria billardierei

Folks often underestimate how big lichens can truly get, often becuase they mistake large lichens for plants. And I couldn't really blame you for thinking P. billardierei is yet another epiphytic plant making itself at home on trees and shrubs in the rainforests of Australia and New Zealand. BUT if you get up close and poke at it a little the lack of veination along the lobe surface, the lack of roots or rhizomes, the rigid lobe texture, and the apothecia reveal it to be lichen! This foliose lichen has long, linear, dichotomously branching lobes that grow in tangled bunches 5-30 cm across. These lobes are foveolate (with pits and depressions (like lungs)), with a gray to gray-green (when dry) to bright lettuce green (when moist) upper surface and a gray lower surface dotted with tiny, white pseudocyphellae. Along the lobe margins it produces apothecia with dark red-brown to black disks surrounded by roughed, tan to red-brown margins. Lichens are slow growing, so if you see a large, healthy P. billardierei in the wild, that is the sign of an undisturbed, old-growth forest, and you should feel very lucky to be in such a rare and vitally important ecosystem.

images: source

Another specklebelly lichen, but i'm not sure which species this one is. As you can see the treetrunk was absolutely encrusted with other species - I really could have spent hours on one tree, finding more species to photograph.

Lichen of a hike I went on two weeks ago

In order:

Pink earth lichen, Dibaeis arcuata

Coral lichen, Pulchrocladia retipora

Coral lichen again but a different morphotype

Pseudocyphellaria glabra

my favourite thing is scientific article titles that read like clickbait

Pseudocyphellaria rainierensis

Oldgrowth specklebelly lichen

Met a cool dude at a lichen conference a few years back who was brave enough to ride in shotgun for me across the great state of Idaho, and he introduced me to to the gorgeous P. rainierensis. This foliose lichen has a loose, ragged-looking thallus with lobes varying in length from 1.5 cm to 20 cm. The upper surface is a pale blue-gray and dimpled to wrinkly in texture. It produces marginal and occasionally laminal lobules and isidia. The lower surface is pale tan to cream, and dotted with pseudocyphellae (pores through the surface to the middle layer of the lichen thallus). P. rainierensis is native to the old growth, temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest of North America. It is rare, and recent reports suggest it is declining. But I am happy to see that lichenologists are working on monitoring it in the wild (and using iNaturalist as one of their tools to do so), and working towards public-private partnerships to protect this awesome dude well into the future. (shout out to my pal Stephen T. Sharrett for his hard work and important contributions leading the way toward a brighter future for this and other imperiled PNW lichens. I wanna be him when I grow up)

images: source | source

Pseudocyphellaria dissimilis