Hymenoscyphus

Cotter River, ACT

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Identification history

Hymenoscyphus	25 May 2016	MichaelMulvaney
Hymenoscyphus	23 May 2016	Heino
Cudoniella pezizioidea	20 May 2016	KenT

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User's notes

Growing on soft black/brown decaying leaves and bark below undecayed leaf litter layer some specimens with fruit body up to 12 mm across.

2 comments

Heino wrote:

23 May 2016

My wariness in naming small, white, featureless ascomycetes from photos led me to look for information about Cudoniella pezizoidea. I know that it is the caption to a photo in Bruce Fuhrer's 'A field guide to Australian fungi', yet the name is missing from Mycobank, the standard database of fungal names - and that was worrying. The explanation is given by Genevieve Gates & David Ratkowsky (A field guide to Tasmanian fungi, Tasmanian Field Naturalists Club, 2014). In their book they show two Hymenoscyphus photos and note that one of them would be what Bruce called Cudoniella pezizoidea, but note that he used that name without giving any reason for doing so, which makes the name Cudoniella pezizoidea invalid. Of course, Bruce's generally admirable book has sold widely and so the invalid name Cudoniella pezizoidea turns up on several websites. Now, getting back to the subject of KenT's photograph - Hymenoscyphus is a plausible guess for the genus and I empasize the word plausible.

KenT wrote:

24 May 2016

Yes how it got placed into Cudoniella I don't know. The first use of the name I had was in McCann 2003 'Australian Fungi Illustrated' and given the preface I'd probably wrongly assumed he had help from the Herbarium of Victoria for his names. Assigning it to Hymenoscyphus is also what has been done in the recent publication by Hubregtse J (2016) Fungi In Australia, Rev. 1.01, E-published by the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria Inc., Blackburn, Victoria, Australia. Web address http://www.fncv.org.au/fungi-in-australia/. I've looked at what someone has possibly believed to the original description (as Helotium pezizoideum Cooke & W. Phillips, Grevillea 19 (91): 72 (1891)) which could almost apply to any small white ascomycete in this group.

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