I was wandering around the Tranquille area the other week taking a few photos. Now that the snow had largely disappeared from south-facing slopes I was eager to photograph some of the mosses and lichens in the grasslands. Many of these species occur on boulders and rock outcrops where crustose lichens display such a diversity of colour and texture. Looking down, it looks like a alien landscape on another planet as seen from high up in the atmosphere.

I think most of the lichen shown above is a species called golden moonglow lichen. It often has a yellowish colour but many of the black round structures in the photo above are apothecia – pie-shaped structures that produce and release fungal spores.

Crustose lichens are often difficult to identify and usually require an examination of the spores by making very fine cross-sections of the apothecia and hoping you can find some mature spores. In the somewhat fuzzy photo below you can see two-celled brown spores in a cross-section of the apothecium. In many species, these spores are often produced in groups of eight.

Not all lichens produce pie-shaped apothecia. In the photo below is a brown crustose lichen that looks like miniature puffballs. If you look closely you can see some of these ball-shaped structures have a small pore in the center. They also produce fungal spores but they are produced in a flask-shaped perithecia  with a tiny opening at the top rather than a pie-shaped apothecia.