Hymenochaete

Macquarie, ACT

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Identification history

Hymenochaete

5 Jul 2016

Heino

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1 comment

Heino wrote:

6 Jul 2016

I found this in a suburban garden on the underside of a fallen, long dead branch (shown in photo 4 with a 40cm ruler). Many species of Hymenochaete grow as flat sheets, mostly in shades of brown. Usually the genus is easy to recognize in the field but further identification is harder work. The brown surface has a dense array of dark brown bristles. These are up to a tenth of a millimetre long, so it's a microscope job to see them properly but you can detect them with a 10x hand lens. They may show up in photos, though you may need to enlarge a photo close to empty magnification and I show this in photo 3. In the left half you see numerous, fuzzy, out-of-focus short streaks, either the bristles themselves or shadows created by them. There is some unevenness in the surface and, near the margin, the surface bends down a little, creating several arrowed areas of shadow. Just where the surface begins to bend down, a number of bristles reflect the light and stand out as short bleached streaks. The scale in photo 2 shows millimetres and the arrow points to three rudimentary growths. In the absence of any neighbours such a growth would continue to grow and eventually produce a large sheet. However, these three would soon merge and you would lose evidence that of the initial three. The some comment holds for the rest of this photo. Is the large brown area in the left half of this photo the result of expansion from one initial growth, from 10, from 100? If I had looked at this branch long ago I might have counted 100 brown patches, some time later only 50 and if I'd left this branch for another month perhaps I'd have found just one continuous sheet. This ties in a little with my comment about abundance in http://canberranaturemap.org/Community/Sightings/Details/3344119 and here also my estimate of abundance is arbitrary.

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