Hypoxylon howeianum

Macquarie, ACT

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Identification history

Hypoxylon howeianum

28 Jun 2016

Heino

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2 comments

Heino wrote:

29 Jun 2016

The fungus is growing on rotting wood in a suburban garden and the white scale bar in each photo represents 5 mm. This fungus produces sexual spores in the roughly hemispherical structures, each with a rusty to reddish-brown coating over a black interior. Asexual spores are produced in the pale greenish to brown branching structures. Many fungi produce sexual and asexual spores and, typically, the structure that produces sexual spores is strikingly different to that which produces asexual spores. So different in fact that, in the 1800s and into the 1900s, it was common to place the sexual form in one genus and the asexual in another because the outward forms were so different. In pre-DNA days it was only by laboratory experiment that two different outward forms could be shown to be manifestations of the one fungal species. You'd show that by taking one sort of spore and (in a sterile laboratory set-up) let it germinate, grow and produce the structure that produced the other type of spore. The sexual state of this fungus has always been placed in the genus Hypoxylon and the asexual state has been thought of as a species of Nodulisporium.

Heino wrote:

30 Jul 2016

This material is now at the Australian National Herbarium, Canberra, as collection number HL6108.

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