Flora of New Zealand Series

≡Melanospora otagensis Linds., Trans. Bot. Soc. Edin. 8: 426 (1866).

Holotype: New Zealand. Otago, Green Island Bluff, on columnar basalt, x.1861, W.L. Lindsay – E.

Description : Flora (1985: 164).

Chemistry : TLC−, all reactions negative.

S: Otago (St Clair back beach, Black Head). On coastal rocks above high tide level, forming thick, spreading, grey-white to dirty creamish colonies, 2–20+ cm in diam., often forming a thick uniform cover over basalt rocks around Dunedin coastal areas. Still very poorly known and collected elsewhere.

Endemic

Illustrations : Lindsay (1866a: pl. 5, figs 7–12 – as Melanospora otagensis).

Encephalographa otagensis is characterised by: the saxicolous habit; the thick, chalky, whitish, subfarinose, areolate thallus; lirelliform to lecideine apothecia; brown, 1-septate ascospores, slightly constricted at septum and appearing soleiform. Lindsay (1866a: 427) notes of the species "...It resembles in thickness, colour and texture the thallus of a sterile condition of Pertusaria velata (Turn.), with which it is associated in the only specimen which occurs in my herbarium; but it is much smoother, more continuous, less rimose, and free of the verrucosities which characterise the thallus of the Pertusaria. ... The spores of M. otagensis bear considerable resemblance to some forms or conditions to those of Opegrapha subeffigurans; but the latter is a corticolous species, the thallus is obsolete, and the apothecia are compound and stellate– Arthonioid. In regard to its apothecia, M. otagensis resembles some forms of Opegrapha spodopolia, which is a saxicolous species; but the apothecia of the latter are generally distinctly Opegraphoid, and frequently elongated and sinuous. The spores, moreover, at once distinguish the two plants, being in the Opegrapha colourless, fusiform and polyseptate...".