Hi, First time I post on that forum. I apologize for my poor english (posting from France). The attached photo was taken a few weeks ago on a dune on the atlantic coast of France. Looks like a lichen, growing together with Ephedra distachya (I do not know the english name). From what I gathered on the web, could be cladonia furcata or something similar. Can somebody confirm ? Thanks Jac more pictures of the lichen at http://fogeo.free.fr/flore/autres_dunaire.html
Perhaps Clavulina cinerea, but I think that you are right. Fear not: I am certain that our members will have a positive ID for you tout de suite. Bienvenue, jac!
thank you tagata57 for your answer and suggestions, I had not considered the possibility that my "lichen" could be a mushroom, I shall dig the idea. Regarding Clavulina, I have never seen large areas of lands covered with it, rather isolated bunches, but maybe somebody knows more about it Jac
Maybe a Cladonia species. Not sure though, as I can only see the thumbnail, the full size photo is not loading (Daniel, this has been a fairly frequent problem in recent weeks, any idea why?).
Aha! Photo loaded on the 5th attempt at clicking on it. Looks good for Cladonia portentosa, though there are several similar species so can't be certain if that is the right one (I am using a UK book, and don't know what species occur in western France).
Off-topic for this thread, but the reason is that the web server is apparently getting to the end of its life (it isn't able to always successfully serve large image files). I had hoped to move the site over to the new hosting services we are going to use before my vacations, but there was far too much prep work and too little time. Right now, I've scheduled Oct 18 for moving the site over and things should return to normal after that.
thanks a lot Michael ! (maybe the pictures at http://fogeo.free.fr/flore/autres_dunaire.html are easier to load ?) You mention "similar species", could you tell us more ? all cladonia's ?
Not all Cladonia spp., no; the others that look fairly similar in my UK book are C. uncialis (next best fit), C. arbuscula, and (somewhat less similar) C. rangiferina (which only occurs in northern Britain northward anyway). It doesn't mention the species C. furcata that you mentioned above, maybe that one doesn't occur in Britain (or if it does, is rare). The book also has another 10 Cladonia spp. which don't look at all similar. PS Daniel - thanks!
Definitely not a Clavulina. It is Cladonia uncialis (ssp. uncialis). Cheers, Harri Harmaja http://www.luomus.fi/users/harmaja/vasculars.htm
Looks plausibly like Cladonia uncialis, which has a huge North American distribution. There are some Cladonias with narrow distributions, however.
Confused I looked up Cladina.... it would appear to be the same as Cladonia! http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cladina
Wierd and interesting! Thank you for sharing that; I'll have to bend some lichenologists ears on this topic. Well, therefore in the old sense of the genera, Cladina and Cladonia represent two distinct morphologies, and the photo in this thread looks like a Cladina in that sense. :-) frog