Gelatinous, on wood – genus uncertain

Cotter River, ACT

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Identification history

	Gelatinous, on wood – genus uncertain	5 Sep 2016	Heino
	Physalacria	22 Aug 2016	KenT

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User's notes

Extensive fruit body production over the upper surface of a fallen log

4 comments

Heino wrote:

23 Aug 2016

Physalacria fruitbodies consist of hollow heads atop stems. These fruitbodies appear to be stem-less blobs, which makes me think of Tremella or Exidia, and I suppose there could be other candidates, but from the photo I can go no further. I know that sometimes an abundance of small white apothecia, growing crowded and distorted, can produce a Tremella-like effect, but since you suggested Physalacria I'm assuming there was no mass discoid growth here.

KenT wrote:

29 Aug 2016

OK, I've now gone back three weeks later and had a look at this and it looked no different. I've removed a small amount of material to mount on a couple of microscope slides, an image from an ammoniacal congo red mount and another from a lactophenol cotton blue mount. I could see no evidence of basidia or clamp connections nor could I see any asci. Instead this looks like a conidial fungus with globose spores being produced at the ends of individual hyphae, anyway I don't know what it is and it may have to remain a mystery.

Heino wrote:

3 Sep 2016

Ken, thanks for the micro-photos. They definitely show this fungus to be a basidiomycete, one of those with Tremella-type basidia. Such basidia are often sub-globose, usually tapering a bit towards their bases and with two internal cross-walls, at right angles to each other and each extending the length of the basidium. When you see such a basidium head-on you get what I call the 'hot-cross-bun' look, a circle around two lines at right angles to each other. In the red photo you see a few such circles with crosses. Unfortunately such Tremella-type basidia are found in a number of genera. Clamp connections are not present in all these gelatinous basidiomycetes and, when present, can be small and sometimes a pain to find. These basidia may still be fairly immature because I see no signs of the hypha-like pseudo-sterigmata emerging from the basidial apices. It would be a shame to lose good photo such as these so I might create some sort of Heterobasidiomycete category on Canberra Nature Map for unidentifiable jellies etc. More are undoubtedly going to turn up.

KenT wrote:

4 Sep 2016

Thanks Heino, I don't remember putting one of this group under a microscope before, the lack of any obvious basidiospores and pseudo-sterigmata confused me completely.

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