Malmidea perplexa
species of fungus
Malmidea perplexa is a corticolous (bark-dwelling), crustose lichen in the family Malmideaceae. It was described in 2011 from northern Thailand. The species has a smooth, grey-green thallus without warts and ascospores that are non-septate and halonate. It resembles Malmidea leptoloma but differs in having lighter-coloured apothecial discs and margins and a smooth thallus.
Taxonomy
The species was introduced as Malmidea perplexa by Klaus Kalb in 2011 within a study on Malmidea and the family Malmideaceae. The holotype was collected on the descent from Doi Mon Larn to Mae Kampong village, east-south-east of Chiang Mai, in evergreen montane forest dominated by Lithocarpus, Quercus and Castanopsis; the specific epithet reflects that the senior author had known the species from Brazil for decades before finding it in Thailand again.
Description
The thallus is crust-like, continuous and smooth, about 100–250 μm thick, dull to slightly shiny and grey-green; soredia and isidia are absent. The medulla is whitish and K–. The photobiont is chlorococcoid with cells 6–8 μm in diameter. Apothecia are sessile, rounded, 0.4–0.7 mm across and 150–180 μm high; the disc is plane to slightly convex and brown-grey to sooty, bordered by a thin biatorine margin of the piperis type that is about 20 μm thick, slightly prominent and whitish-grey to dark brownish-grey.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 3, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q21326243. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Malmidea perplexa” 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.