Flora of New Zealand Series

Type : Solorina crocea (L.) Ach. [=Lichen croceus L.]

Description : Flora (1985: 527).

Solorina is a genus of 10 species (Hue 1911; Kirk et al. 2001; Ryan & Vitikainen 2004) included in the family Peltigeraceae (Eriksson et al. 2004; Pennycook & Galloway 2004; Eriksson 2005). Recent molecular studies show Solorina to be closely related to Peltigera and that its accommodation in the Peltigeraceae is preferable to retaining a separate family, the Solorinaceae (Eriksson & Strand 1995). Solorina differs from Peltigera in having laminal and not marginal apothecia. The asci have an IKI+ ring at the apex in both genera, but the ascospores are 1-septate, thick-walled and dark-brown in Solorina, whereas they are pluriseptate, thin-walled and hyaline in Peltigera. Lichenicolous fungi occurring on Solorina are discussed in Hawksworth (1986b). Most of the known species are arctic-alpine taxa (S. bispora, S. crocea, S. embolima, S. macrospora, S. octospora, S. saccata, S. spongiosa) either localised or circumboreal in the Northern Hemisphere; three taxa occur in Africa (S. simensis, S. sorediifera, S. spongiosa); two in Asia (S. platycarpa, S. simensis) and two are bipolar (S. crocea, S. spongiosa), the latter occurring in tundra vegetation in the mountains of South I. in New Zealand (Galloway 1998b). Solorina crocea was first collected in New Zealand in the early 1920s by H.H. Allan (Galloway 1976c, 1978b) on Mt Peel, an eastern outlier of the Southern Alps standing above the Canterbury Plains to the south of the Rangitata River, and a refugium for a number of flowering plants which were apparently protected there from the severest glacial episodes of the Pleistocene. Here, among the tundra vegetation of the Middle Peak, Allan found several bipolar lichens, including Alectoria nigricans, Cetraria islandica ssp. antarctica and Solorina crocea, all at that time largely unknown from the Southern Hemisphere (Allan 1927). He sent these, plus several others, to the Swedish botanist G. Einar Du Rietz in Uppsala for identification (Galloway 1976). Of these Du Rietz (1929) wrote: "In 1925 Dr H.H.Allan sent me for identification a small lichen collection from Mt Peel, one of the eastern mountains of the South Island of New Zealand. It contained inter alia a specimen of Cetraria islandica not previously known from New Zealand. Though there were some Arctic lichens mentioned from New Zealand in the old literature, this was the first case that was beyond doubt."