Mushrooms 'n Moss 'n Mold

Cosmic Horror Fungi Mug

🍄🍄‍🟫Handbuilt pottery with 5 Lovecraftian mushroom entities. 🍄‍🟫🍄

Triplets

Behold! A hornwort.

First two are from the Mendenhal glacier hiking trail, and the rest are from a beautiful tree in Skagway!

Aspicilia aquatica 

I have been holding in the truth about a tragedy in my life I have been dealing with behind the scenes: I have recently developed a chocolate allergy. I know, it sucks. And since then, everything reminds me of chocolate. So is it any surprise that I look at A. aquatica and start craving cookies-and-cream ice cream? And when it's greenish, mint-chocolate-chip? This crustose lichen, as the epithet would suggest, has an affinity for water, and can be found on siliceous rock near or submerged in freshwater bodies in temperate to boreal-montane habitats. It has a pale gray to pale olive, rimose (cracked) to areolate (tile-like) thallus surrounded by a thin blue-black prothallus (border of fungal hyphae). It produces concave, black-disked apothecia with prominent true margins (rim around the apothecia emerging from the disc material) and thin thalline margins (rim around the apothecia emerging from the thallus material). Luckily I haven't developed a lichen allergy, as far as I can tell, so I am free to eat whichever lichens I wish! Too bad they all taste awful . . .

images: source | source | source

Silent architects of rot and bloom, weavers in the forest gloom. Threads unseen through earthly veins, conjure life from death’s remains.

Euopsis granatina 

Lesser rockbud lichen, ground beef lichen

This arctic-alpine lichen grows on acidic rock in moist, sunny microhabitats, often mixed with or overgrowing Rhizocarpon lichens. It has a . . . huh, I don't really know how to describe the thallus form. Kinda scaley? Kinda plate-like? It generally falls into the "crustose" category, but it is like, bigger and thicker and rounder and clearly has its own unique shape thing going on. And that's not all! It has 2 different photobionts (Trebouxia green algae and Gloeocapsa cyanobacteria) but unlike most tripartite lichens which have a dominant green algal photobiont and cyanobacteria stored in smaller thallus subsections, E. granatina's thallus is mostly cyanobacterial, with small green algal subsections. Weeeird. The upper surface is a mottled red-brown, appearing gelatinous and almost fleshy when moist. It produces shiny red-brown apothecia (described as "recalling small garnets"). Just some globs of browned ground beef studded with garnets. Lichens are wild, man.

images: source | source | source