Biatora aureolepra
species of fungus
Biatora aureolepra is a species of lichen in the family Ramalinaceae, first found in inland rainforests of British Columbia. This lichen forms thin, powdery crusts that are bright yellow-green when fresh but fade to golden tones over time, and it has never been observed producing fruiting bodies. It grows on the bark and decaying wood of conifers in very humid, old-growth forests and has a scattered distribution in northwestern North America, central Norway, and Austria.
Taxonomy
The species was described in 2009 by Toby Spribille and Tor Tønsberg during a survey of inland rainforest lichens; the holotype, collected from soft conifer wood beside the Roaring River arm of Quesnel Lake, British Columbia (716 m a.s.l.), is lodged in the Canadian Museum of Nature herbarium, with duplicates in Bergen and other collections. Its name combines the Latin aureolus (“golden-yellow”) with lepra ('scurf' or 'leprosy'), a nod to the species' golden hue in dried material and its powdery habit.
Because B. aureolepra has never been seen with apothecia, its placement in Biatora is provisional. Morphological and chemical traits—especially the leprose crust and the C+ (rose) reaction—suggest affinity with Biatora chrysantha and B. chrysanthoides, yet the new species lacks the small corticate areoles typical of those taxa and it contains far more 5-O-methylhiascic acid. That depside is known as a major compound in only two leprose crusts worldwide (B. aureolepra and Micarea coppinsii), allowing the new species to be distinguished readily from superficially similar yellow-green crusts of Lecanora expallens, Cliostomum spp., or Lepraria spp., which possess other chemistries and usually inhabit drier bark.
Description
Biatora aureolepra forms a thin, leprose crust that is bright yellow-green when fresh but often fades to straw-coloured or golden tones in older herbarium specimens. The thallus lacks any layered (stratified) structure; instead, the fungal filaments grow partly within the outer bark or sapwood (endosubstratal), while a single surface layer of powdery soredia builds a patchy film several centimetres across.
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This entry incorporates text from “Biatora aureolepra” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.