Dasyscyphella nivea

1 Macquarie, ACT

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Identification history

Dasyscyphella nivea

28 Jul 2020

Heino1

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Heino1 wrote:

29 Jul 2020

The fruitbodies were growing on an partly rotted but still firm oak stave from an old wine barrel. In Photo 2 the red arrows point to the ends of what looks like a string of dilute snot. I must have inadvertently caused several of the milky, watery droplets to coalesce when I was positioning the oak stave for the photo. The fact that I generated this snotty string shows that the liquid in the droplets has some viscosity, so that the droplets aren't simply pure water that has condensed on the fungus. Rather, they must have arisen from the exudate mentioned in the species' description (https://admin-canberra.naturemapr.org/Community/Species/Sightings/45355). The main part of Photo 3 shows much of a dried fruitbody that I had rehydrated in tap water, placed with the cup surface against a slide, then gently squashed a cover slip over the specimen before photographing it, via transmitted light, with the help of a microscope. You can see a number of the orange to brown resinous lumps mentioned in the species' description. Arrow 1 points to part of the stem and 2 to some of the colourless calcium oxalate crystals (shown enlarged in the lower left inset) that you find in abundance on the hairy underside of this stalked cup fungus. The other insets show parts of three of the hairs that coat the underside. At the upper left you can easily see the fine, granular encrustation that coats the hair (except for the apical and sub-apical cells). Arrow 3 points to perhaps an oxalate crystal or some exudate on one hair.

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