Most months, Jasper has introduced us to a new fungus or group of fungi that have made their appearance in woodlands,  some on trees or branches or leaves, others simply emerging from the soil.  Some fungi are parasitic or biotrophic requiring a living host organism on which they feed.  Then there are those that live in and feed on dead and decaying matter in the soil; these are termed saprobic or saprophytic.  The structures that we normally see (particularly at this time of the year) are the fruiting or reproductive bodies of the fungus / fungi.  The majority of a fungus exists as a network of microscopic ‘tubes’ that permeate either the host organism, or the soil / decaying matter in which the fungus has made its ‘home’.  An individual tube is known as a hypha and collectively they form a complex network - the mycelium. The fungal mycelia present in the soil form a vast underground network.   Some of these fungi enter into beneficial associations with plants - mycorrhizal associations.  The fungal hyphae wrap themselves around (and sometimes into) the roots of plants and trees, with whom they share minerals and nutrients. Generally speaking, the fungus helps to supply the plant with mineral nutrients (like nitrates / phosphates) and in return receives carbohydrate material from the plant’s photosynthetic capacity.  These mycorrhizal systems form part of what has been termed the ‘wood wide web’.  Dr. Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist from the University of British Columbia, coined the term to describe the complex relationships between fungi and plants in woodland and forest ecosystems. It has been suggested that (millions of years ago) fungi helped plants transition from their aquatic home to life on land, with the fungal network serving as a ‘root system’.  Fungi (and bacteria) release enzymes (biological catalysts) and these help break down the complex compounds (like lignin, cellulose and starch) present in dead plants and animals.  As a result of this decomposition, humus is formed. Humus is a colloid.  A complex mixture of materials, some in solution, some in suspension. Humus binds the inorganic mineral particles of the soil together, is a store of nutrients and helps water retention.  The fungal network in the soil sequesters enormous amounts of carbon.  The soil is one of the Earth’s main carbon ‘sinks’.   If soil is over-worked or damaged by the intensive and extensive use of chemicals in farming, then it degrades and with it the rich microbial network. Damage to the soil and its complex microbial population can impact on the growth of plants - from the simplest green plants to the largest trees. Not only are soil fungi and bacteria involved in the cycling of carbon and nitrogen, but they help maintain the fertility and structure of the soil.  Soil is the ultimate recycling system, we need to cherish the soil and its fungal and bacterial populations - it helps maintain the ecosystem services on which we all depend.  Without healthy soils, we face a very bleak future.  

When you look across cultivated fields you are usually surveying an unrelenting monoculture  -of earth or wheat or grass. Lots of pesticides and fertilizers are used and there are regular assaults by bladed machines.  It's bleak for wildlife, whether plants or animals.  But nature is resourceful and clings on where it can.  And within intensive agricultural areas there is a pattern to the small oases of diversity. There is more diversity where an obstacle stops the machines in their track  Sometimes that's a linear feature like a river or a hedge or maybe just a fence, but often it's just a sticky-up object. A tree, a pylon, a pole, or even a wind-turbine.   At the base of objects sticking up in fields you often find a clump of plants, sometimes flowers, and shelter for small mammals and birds.  Taking the train through northern France recently, I realised how extremely industrialised their countryside has become and it's the same in most of Lincolnshire.  Hedges have been removed, single trees are rare and every effort is directed to increasing wheat / crop production.  Diversity is not just discouraged but it is seen as the enemy - a small copse or hedge can harbour swarms of crop-eaters so these have usually been grubbed out (as have many ponds (see the woodlands blog on ghost ponds in Norfolk).  Whatever the spin and rhetoric, the large scale farmer is at odds with biodiversity. The soil is a highly lucrative resource where farmers want to maximise their returns.  Increasingly, they use modern technology with tractors guided by SatNav, planting twice a year, with harvesting dictated by accurate weather forecasts and sophisticated seedlings being protected and fed by brutally efficient pesticides and fertilisers.  Lip service is often paid to the farmers' role in looking after the countryside but in reality most of them are businessmen and businesswoman wanting to optimise returns.  Farming businesses' borrowings and financial objectives don't allow them to spend too long worrying about biodiversity or the "hundred harvests" concern - that, when treated badly, the soil will be mostly gone (e.g fenland blows) or made unusable within 50 or 100 years. Refuge is an important concept in ecology: the idea that an organism gets protection from predation by hiding in inaccessible areas. Coral reefs are an example of habitats where animals can take refuge, and rainforests contain numerous physical refuges. [The concept of refuges or refugia has developed in recent years].   In the case of the arable fields of Britain,  it seems as if it is mainly the "sticky-up things" and linear features  (hedgerows etc.) which provide refuge, but not just from animal predation but from humans and their machinery.  Nature is reacting to humans as if they are the predators. There are thousands of objects in the countryside which act as refuges - it's a benign and unintended consequence of landscape clutter.  For example signposts, pillar boxes, mobile phone masts, abandoned fence posts, and even discarded farm equipment.  These objects can also offer a structure for plants to climb up in their quest for sunlight and they can provide shelter from wind, but mostly they offer protection against the farmer and the machines.  Unfortunately, the natural human instinct is usually to tidy up everything in sight, which often works to the detriment of biodiversity.  It would be better to protect vegetation and stop mammals from being mashed up by mowers / machinery, and it is often the residual sticky-up features that protect these small refuges.  Perhaps we need less rural de-cluttering of the British landscape, and more ‘mini refuges’.  

The decline in many insect populations across the globe is worrying, threatening economies and ecosystems.  A German study in 2017 indicated that the mass of flying insects (in various natural areas) had fallen by some 70%+.  The decline in insect populations has been associated with habitat fragmentation, the spread of agriculture and the use of pesticides, with the neonicotinoids being particularly associated with damage to bee and bumblebee populations. Recent work at the University of Konstanz suggests that when bumblebee colonies are exposed to limited resources of nectar and exposure to the herbicide - glyphosate,  then their colonies may fail.  Bumblebee colonies need a good supply of nectar as a ‘fuel’ in order to maintain a constant brood temperature (of approximately 32oC).  Only at this sort of temperature does the eggs & larvae develop quickly from egg to adult, and the colony grow from a single queen to several hundred bees.  If the temperature is not maintained, then the brood develops slowly or not at all.  The loss of wild flowers (and their nectar) plus the use of the herbicide (in agricultural areas) looks to be a problem for the bumblebees. Just as bumblebees are facing problems, so are honey bees.  The bees have faced infections with a variety of viruses, such as the deformed wing virus.  This virus affects wing development so that the wings are 'stubby' and useless, plus they may be deformities of the abdomen and leg paralysis;  the insect cannot function and dies.  The virus is transmitted by the Varroa mite - a parasite (that also feeds on the bees’ tissues).  The virus was originally identified in Japan in 1980’s and is referred to as DWV-A.  However, a new form of the virus (DWV-B) was identified in the Netherlands in 2001 and it is spreading across Europe, and to other continents.  Sadly, this variant of the virus kills bees faster and is more easily transmitted (according to research at the Martin Luther University).

Ladybirds are to be encouraged (with the exception of the harlequin ladybird) as they help control pests such as aphids (greenfly and blackfly). Aphids ‘drain’ nutrient rich sap from host plants and also spread viruses with their piercing mouthparts. Some ladybirds add to their diet with nectar and as they sip nectar from flowers, they may also carry pollen from one flower to another.  Like many other insects, species of native british ladybirds have declined in recent years, many outcompeted by the harlequin ladybird (which is an introduced species from Asia.  Harlequins also harbour a fungus which can infect native ladybirds). [caption id="attachment_39002" align="aligncenter" width="675"] a ladybird 'stalking' aphids[/caption] Ladybirds are coccinellid beetles.  They belong to the order – Coleoptera – and are characterised by having forewings modified to form hard wing covers (ELYTRA) and they have biting mouthparts (as compared to butterflies and moths, which have a proboscis*).  Their wing covers are brightly coloured, and they serve as a warning to predators of their bitter taste. Ladybrds can also exude a pungent fluid to ward off ants, birds and people. Recent work at Cornell University (and the Lost Ladybug Project) has suggested ways in which ladybirds might be encouraged in the garden.   Strategies that might encourage ladybirds include : Growing plants that have hairs on their surfaces that offer some protection from predators,  Plants that 'offer' food such as nectar , or prey (aphids).  For example, aphids are often to be found on roses which frequently are home to aphids. Plants that give visual (or chemical) cues. More ladybirds were observed on the plants from the Umbellifer,  Daisy and Rose families  They seem to be drawn particularly to yellow flowers. [caption id="attachment_30742" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Aphids on yellow - beware![/caption]   * though some species such as the Humming-bird Hawk-moth have a 'tongue' which it uses to sip nectar

The first few weeks of owning a patch of woodland feel like the beginning of a long and special relationship. Every discovery is new; each adventure a first. A wood reveals it secrets slowly.   We’ve already tramped round every corner of the wood, tearing our shins on brambles, sniffing at fungi, clambering round stumps and totting up the oak, hazel, maple, cherry and rowan that thrive under our canopy of pine and larch. We’ve sat and looked and listened in all weathers, at every time of day. Starting a list of birds was the first thing to do: a mewing buzzard overhead, marsh tits pitching in the roving tit flock, the tap of woodpecker and nuthatch. Autumn – though this year so mild and late – soon announced itself with a first skein of pink-footed geese calling high and unseen over the wood, the first redwing chattering at the wood edge… sounds and colours change; the big wheel keeps on turning… We have always loved moths, for their beauty, their ubiquity, their astonishing variety. Moths range in size from the tiny micros whose larvae leave scribbled signatures across the leaves in which they live, to the powerful hawkmoths or that mythic blue-underwinged beauty the Clifden Nonpareil, a creature practically the size of a small bat, and probably the most sought-after moth among the old collectors with, in some years, just a single individual found across the country. For there’s also a rich and often eccentric history of moth recording in this country with most of the larger moths – the macros - having evocative vernacular names (though don’t confuse your Bright-line Brown-eye with a Brown-line Bright-eye!), and an array of techniques for acquiring them from pupa digging, plastering tree trunks with mixtures of treacle and rum, to light. Nowadays, moths are generally photographed and released rather than pinned; recording them is an excellent way of assessing the biodiversity of a site or tracking population changes. It was clearly time to break out the old moth trap.   And so it was that this September for the first time in years we dusted down the generator, filled the trap with fresh egg boxes for the anticipated moths to settle on, spread out our white sheet in a promising looking glade, and hoped to goodness that our 125W mercury vapour bulb would still fire up after all these years… As night came the light shed unfamiliar shadows through the wood; we waited, net in hand, taking care not to look directly at the blazing UV light; waited with a palpable sense of anticipation… what secret would the wood reveal? At first, nothing. And then a first furtive fluttering across the clearing to the trap – probably a Common Marbled Carpet though I’d have to check – and a plumper-bodied moth, and me there wracking my brains: it’s a noctuid, sure, but I’m so rusty – what’s-it-called? Flame? Flame Shoulder? Setaceous Hebrew Character…? ‘What the hell was that?’ said Beth Something ridiculously large had flapped out of the shadows and vanished. Knelt at the trap, I’d glimpsed it too from the corner of my eye. Could it be a hawkmoth on our very first trap, that would be very cool! I grabbed the net; we stood back and waited. I knew we had something beyond the ordinary when Beth yelled ‘There it is!’ and I swung the net and captured it on a second sweep. It was big all right! Anxious not to lose our catch, whatever it was, we shut ourselves in the toolshed and peered into the gently-opening net with our torch… The moth was the shape of a vulcan, practically size of a small bat, and more beautiful than anyone can do justice to: a marbled, lichenous beauty, zig-zagged and pocked and dabbed with greys and whites and blacks and – look! – when those forewings flick open an underwing black and banded with an impossible flash of blue… ‘It’s a Blue Underwing,’ we cried, ‘A Clifden Nonpareil…!’ An entry in my Aurelian’s Fireside Companion describes the experience soberly: ‘For a moment or two we gazed at it in speechless admiration, fearing almost to breathe lest it take flight…’.  I suspect we used a few more expletives than that!   And what a secret to reveal; our first trap in the new wood and we caught probably the best moth we could ever hope to find. One truly without compare.  Soon after the generator packed in; we were plunged into darkness. 2022, it transpires, has been a record year for Clifden Nonpareils, as it has been for many rare moths. Our Nonpareil could have been a wanderer from further south in England where a population has now reestablished itself on aspen and poplar after decades of extinction – or (and I find this the more romantic possibility) it could have been a migrant from the east, flapping its way across the North Sea to our northerly inland wood, and revealing itself, albeit briefly, to its astonished and delighted admirers…  By torchlight, we placed the moth on a tree stump, astounded to see something we’d always dreamt of finding. It sat there for a moment, as though contemplative, then showed a flash of blue petticoat as it shivered its huge and brindled grey wings. Shivered again. And flew off into the night. What will the seasons bring?

A fungi fanatic with a camera and a macro lens is never bored outdoors. At least, that’s how I tried to console myself when left stranded at a rural train station in East Kent having just missed my hourly train by a matter of minutes and realising that the next one was delayed by a further half hour. A brief wander around the environs to kill time proved me right when I came across a cluster of small grey mushrooms getting up to 2cm in cap diameter growing amongst the moss on a raised grassy patch at the far end of the platform. The mossy substrate, the indented cap and the widely-spaced gills running down the stem made identification a relatively straightforward business – these were part of the Arrhenia genus, which depending on the species can adopt either a pleurotoid (literally “side-ear form”) form, like the soft brackets we see with oyster mushrooms, or an omphalinoid form, from the Greek word ‘omphalos’ for belly button, with a central stem and decurrent gills running down it and an umbrella-shaped cap with a deep central depression.  [caption id="attachment_39104" align="aligncenter" width="675"] The Moss Navel in classic omphalinoid form with an indented cap and decurrent gills.[/caption] Looking at the spores back at home under the microscope corroborated the initial suspicion that these were Arrhenia rickenii, the Moss Navel, which according to its entry on the First Nature website is “a rarely recorded species, probably due at least in part to its small size and the tendency to be obscured by mosses” – and the fact that it is found in such nondescript liminal places as rural train stations, no doubt. There are numerous species of fungi that can be found growing on moss. Let us for now, however, ignore the tiny disc-like ascomycetes and other even more microscopic “bryophilous fungi” in which the interest is so niche that any information is limited to such specialist sites as this one, and instead focus on a handful of the more obvious mushroom-shaped ones. Most sources will refer to mushrooms such as the Moss Navel as saprophytic, meaning they derive their nutrition from decaying organic material, but with many species associating exclusively with particular species of mosses, many suspect this relationship between fungi and host is probably more complicated, as I alluded to in last month’s post on waxcaps. Yes, to know your bryophilous fungi, you often have to know your bryophytes. And what better place to start than following this link to The British Bryological Society... [caption id="attachment_39105" align="aligncenter" width="675"] The widely-spaced decurrent gills of the Moss Navel.[/caption] The initial issue I had with identifying my find was that different Arrhenia species are found alongside different mosses, and sometimes even lichens. Arrhenia peltigerina, for example, is found alongside the leafy Dog Lichen (Peltigera species), and hence its common name is the Lichen Navel. Arrhenia spathulata, a pleurotoid gill-less species known as the Spatulate Oysterling, is restricted to the moss Syntrichia ruraliformis (“star moss”) found growing on sand dunes or similar environments. The Moss Navel is not so fussy, it seems, which would probably make it one of the more common Arrhenia species, as is the case with another much smaller and orange-coloured omphaloid, the Orange Mosscap (Rickenella fibula). Actually both of these species were once considered, by dint of their shape, to be part of the same genus, with the Moss Navel previously known as Omphalina rickenii before its renaming to the current monicker in 1989, and the Orange Mosscap referred to as Omphalina fibula. [caption id="attachment_39106" align="aligncenter" width="675"] Orange Mosscap[/caption] The Orange Mosscap is a mushroom that is easily missed and just as easily misidentified, with a cap diameter of under a centimetre and often much less than that. Unlike Orange Mosscap, it isn’t just restricted to grassland mosses, such as those found in areas such as damp lawns and graveyards, but is commonly found on moss-covered tree stumps or fallen trunks.  While the cap and stem are orange and slightly translucent (the cap can wash out to a paler colour with age), the gills are white, and if you can get a close enough look at them using either a hand lens or a camera macro lens, you will notice that they are strongly decurrent, running down the slender stem and giving the whole mushroom a nail-shaped form. When up close and personal like this, one will also note that both cap and stem are covered in tiny bristles called cystidia, which are relatively large sterile cells found in the fruit bodies of gilled mushrooms that can aid identification. [caption id="attachment_39107" align="aligncenter" width="675"] The upper cap surface of the Orange Mosscap, covered in fine hairs that can also be seen on the stem.[/caption] The main lookalike mushroom that one is likely to confuse the Orange Mosscap with is the Orange Bonnet (Mycena acicula), whose orange cap ironically makes it the one of the most distinctive of the very difficult Mycena group of mushrooms to identify (see my previous posts on Frosty Bonnets and Rosy Bonnets).  The Orange Bonnet is quite a common find, and again very small, but while it is found in mossy areas, it is deciduous leaf and other woodland litter that is its substrate rather than the moss itself. The cap is pruinose, meaning with a dusty surface, rather than distinctly hairy, but it is the gills one needs to look at – these are adnexed or free rather than decurrent, meaning they are not attached to the stem at all. [caption id="attachment_39111" align="aligncenter" width="675"] The underside of the Orange Bonnet, with the adnexed gills distinguishing it from the decurrent gills of the Orange Mosscap.[/caption] Both Orange Mosscaps and Orange Bonnets have white gills and leave white spore prints, which will distinguish them from the final group of mushrooms to which they might be compared, those in the genus of Galerina. Many of this group fall within the LBM (‘little brown mushroom’) category that most mycologists and forages choose to overlook due to their insignificant size and nondescript appearance, but a few, such as the Moss Bell (Galerina hypnorum), the Veiled Bell (Galerina calyptrata), the Dwarf Bell (Galerina pumila) and the Hairy Leg Bell (Galerina vittiformis) among others, do have small orange caps and are found growing among similar mosses and mossy areas as our previous examples. These posts, incidentally, are not about foraging, but even though these mushrooms are not of a size to make them culinarily worthwhile, I would strongly advise against anyone ingesting them in the vain hope of some other form of more spiritual nourishment. Many Galerina species contain potentially deadly toxins, most notoriously the aptly-named Funeral Bell (Galerina marginata). [caption id="attachment_39110" align="aligncenter" width="675"] The dusty ‘pruinose’ surface of the Orange Bonnet.[/caption] The stem characteristics will provide some help of distinguishing the aforementioned Galerina species from the Orange Mosscaps and Orange Bonnets, and to some extent from one another – they are a lot more fibrous, many with white fibrils running longitudinally down the stipe, and some species have distinct rings around them beneath the cap. The bell-shaped striate cap also marks them out from the omphaloid characteristics of the Orange Mosscap. [caption id="attachment_39109" align="aligncenter" width="675"] A grassland Galerina in moss, possibly a Hairy Leg Bell. Note the fibrous stem and orange gill colour.[/caption] But again, and one cannot emphasise this enough, the best way to work out what you are looking at is to go straight for the gills and spores. Galerina have light orange to rust-brown adnexed gills, neither white nor decurrent, and if you leave them on a piece of paper to get a spore print, the deposit will be accordingly orange to brown, not white. And the fail-proof way of characterising any of these would be to look at the spore size and shape using a microscope and compare against other references such as the First Nature website. This post is essentially an ode to moss and all that live amongst them, to a substrate that in the dampness of Autumn provides a rich host for a number of species and which one might well want to take a closer look at when seeing what’s about in the woods or pastures. [caption id="attachment_39114" align="aligncenter" width="675"] The Orange Mosscap (Rickenella fibula)[/caption]