A Day To Remember

Last summer I was visited by two OMLA student members, Tomás Curtis and Chris Poling, for a weekend of botanizing. Any day in the field is better than a day at home, but sometimes everything comes together and you have a day to remember.

Our first day we traveled to the Edge of Appalachia preserve system and met another OMLA member, Mark Zloba. Our goal was to find Thyrea confusa, a rare lichen with one old Ohio record in Ottawa County and a recent one for Adams County. Thyrea confusa, jelly strap lichen, is a very small fruticose species which always grows on bare limestone or dolomitic rock. It has tiny (~3-10 mm), black, strap-shaped and sometimes forked thalli. In Lichens of North America, Brodo indicates that it is widely scattered but the distribution is too poorly known to map.

This species was found in an Adams County cedar barren prairie by local naturalist Barbara Lund in 2002, but more recent attempts to relocate it have failed. Mark took us to the site where it was collected earlier and after a little searching we found the jelly strap on two rocks!

Thyrea confusa. Photo by Tomás Curtis

Dermatocarpon dolamiticum. Photo by Tomás Curtis

At the same site we also found Dermatocarpon dolamiticum, a common Ozark lichen, but a new species for Ohio! This species frequently has overlapping lobes like D. luridum, but its thallus is thinner and more brittle and as the name implies, it usually grows on dry alkaline rocks, while D. luridum prefers moist rocks.

Next we visited Lynx Prairie and Mark showed us some of the prairie plants for which the area is known. After that we visited one of the sites for Phaeophyscia leana, another very rare lichen known from The Edge property (see WANTED (Alive)! PHAEOPHYSCIA LEANA by Mark Zloba. 2017 OBELISK, p. 23).

At the end of our day we were back at The Eulett Center where Tomás was looking at some of the difficult specimens in Mark’s lichen collection. Here he found another new for Ohio species, Peltigera phyllidiosa, an isidiate pelt lichen. This species is similar to P. elisabethae, and the original collection of that species may have been misidentified.

This is why we should always collect voucher specimens and why another look at them is always desirable.

Peltigera phyllidiosa. Photo by Tomás Curtis

So we relocated an extant population of a rare species and found two new lichens for Ohio. Indeed, a day to remember!

-Ray Showman