Bonfire fungus

I've been checking Funaria-covered bonfire sites for fruit bodies of bryoparasitic fungi for ages, so I was pleased to finally spot some little orange apothecia near the car park at Cwm Llwch (Brecon Beacons) at the weekend.

Using the bryoparasitic pezizales website, the large, smooth, elliptical spores are a good fit with Octospora excipulata (web link here), which seems to be the commonest of the three fungi recorded as parasitic on Funaria.

Funaria hygrometrica in Glamorgan

Couldn't resist doing the same analysis for our Glamorgan data set, which is suitable for the last seven years only. Very interesting topic and as I suggested on your Twitter post, I wonder how much habitat survey bias might effect the frequency of recording. We probably examine a lot more brown field sites in Glamorgan than you do in Pembs, Carms & Mons (as we have a lot more of them!), a habitat in which the species seems to do well, as shown by my Felindre photo below, where Fun.hyg. was dominant in some areas. This might help explain the difference between our plots and I suspect an analysis of specific habitats might be more revealing?

Is Funaria hygrometrica declining?

I knocked up this plot to examine what percentage of my bryophyte records from VC35 each year were Funaria hygrometrica.  I'm sure that my recording habitats have changed a bit since 2000, but then and now I was tetrad-bashing, so visited 'grot' habitats as well as nice places, and recorded all that I saw rather than just noting rarities.  I was obviously inactive here in 2009-2015, but have corrected for variation in recording effort by looking at percentage of records per year rather than actual number of Funaria records.  Since 2016, when VC35 recording really kicked back in, my sightings of Funaria are extremely low.  Certainly the trend appears to be downwards.

This moss was considered commonplace when I started bryophyte recording in the 1990s, and grew on tracks and pavements, in plant pots and occasionally in natural habitats, as well as the traditional 'fire sites'.  Three of my four sightings this year have been in rather 'natural' places - 2 forestry tracks and a mountain path - with one on a road verge.  God forbid, but could this be another victim of N pollution?  It used to grow where there was a bit of enrichment, for example by a bonfire, but perhaps most of our environment is so N-enriched that Funaria is no longer able to prosper.

Perhaps I'm making a big fuss about nothing, but this question has been in the back of my mind for a while and there really does seem to have been a change.

Filling in the gaps

During the last few weeks H and I have been revisiting a lot of NPT monads in an attempt to fill in the gaps in the records of several common species like Bryum dichotomum, B. argenteum and Funaria hygrometrica, mostly along forestry roads.

Bryum dichotomum

Bryum argenteum and Funaria hygrometrica

Funaria hygrometrica

Now is a good time to record these seemingly prosaic species, which are important ruderal pioneers. Although we haven't seen anything very special, it was nice to see a colony of Blasia pusilla along a cinder track near the Tennant Canal in Jersey Marine yesterday. Unfortunately, the plants were rather decrepit and they had lost their flasks, but there were a few stellate gemmae.

Blasia pusilla, Jersey Marine

Stellate gemma of Blasia pusilla 

 This is the third population we've seen in NPT, but colonies are always rather transient.