Another denizen of my beloved frullania filled micro-jungles. This is Dictyonema coppinsii - a noodly little blue string pudding of a lichen.
It's a basidiomycete - an offshoot from the genus Arrhenia which mostly consists of fairly generic-looking small brown mushrooms but it has been utterly transformed in its new symbiotic lifestyle with cyanobacteria.
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| A small willow tree trunk covered in Dictyonema coppinsii |
Under the microscope you can see transparent fungal hyphae encasing blue-green filaments of the photobiont.
The fungus also grows white spore-bearing structures on available underhangs.
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| Viewed from below showing smooth, white basidiomata. |
In the american tropics there is an impressive diversity of related species but Dictyonema coppinsii is the only one known from Britain so far. Look for it in damp, shady woodlands where leafy liverworts abound.
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| A large, fancy basidiolichen from the related genus Cora seen growing in El Cajas, Ecuador. |
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References:Cornejo, C. and Scheidegger, C. (2016),
Cyanobacterial gardens: the liverwort Frullania asagrayana acts as a reservoir of lichen photobionts.
Environmental Microbiology Reports, 8: 352-357.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-2229.12386
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Cannon, P., Coppins, B., Sanderson, N. & Simkin, J. (2025).
Basidiomycota, including Multiclavula (Hydnaceae) and Arrhenia, Dictyonema, Eonema and Lichenomphalia (Lichenomphaliaceae).
Revisions of British and Irish Lichens 54: 1–11.
______Manuela Dal-Forno, James D. Lawrey, Masoumeh Sikaroodi, Smriti Bhattarai, Patrick M. Gillevet, Marcelo Sulzbacher, Robert Lücking, (2013)
Starting from scratch: Evolution of the lichen thallus in the basidiolichen Dictyonema (Agaricales: Hygrophoraceae),
Fungal Biology,
Volume 117, Issue 9,
Pages 584-598,
ISSN 1878-6146,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.funbio.2013.05.006
