#dibaeis

[balthazarslostlibrary]

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

Pseudocyphellaria sp.

[cedar-glade]

Dibaeis absoluta

A pink earth lichen

This one is a bit less common than the pastel/ bluegrey thallused pink earth lichen which looks almost like a Cladonia spp. thallus with little stocked pink mushrooms. Each one of these pink dots is pretty small comparative to it’s more common relative and it’s thallus looks somewhere in between a heavily saturated very green filmy scalewort or a algal mass. This was growing on acidic sandstone in Red River Gorge. Copperas Creek Dist. KY

[cedar-glade]

Red River Gorge might as well be a lichen hot spot. I could spend hours in solitude marvelling at the amount of lichen diversity available to the every day hiker out for a jaunt through the plateaus and woods. 

Pink Earth Lichen, Dibaeis baeomyces,  is a fairly unmistakeable showy lichen that many of you have probably come across from time to time and wondered what it is. The base is a crustose matrix of Ascomycetes farming their cyanobacterium until individual mating types of the ascomycetes within the thallus mate and eventually form what is essentially the ascocarp. The pink bodied ascocarp is a combination of a stalk like ascophore and a bulbed out sac apothecia at it’s apex which is the spore producing body of the lichen. The reason why I said it’s fairly unmistakeable is because we have another look-a-like in the eastern half of North America that has a reduced stalk and a flattened head that shares very similar appearance, called Icmadophila ericetorum. The soil types I associate these with are usually a sandstone or acidic based shallow pine matt soil that has some ability to soak up water. 

Photographed along lost trail at Red River Gorge, Ky

Bonus ! the bottom photo is a humming bird nest that I found attached to a lichen covered cliff !

[lovecraftsgarden]

Dibaeis baeomyces

Pink Earth Lichen

(via)

[wild-e-eep]

Match-head like lichen fruiting bodies. Dibaeis arcuata.