Flora of New Zealand Series

Description : Thallus irregularly spreading or straggling through bryophytes, ±loosely attached to substratum, dark lead-grey or blue-black when wet, pale bluish grey to dull lead-grey when dry, 0.5–1 (–2) cm diam., 60–90 μm thick, corticolous. Lobes rounded to oblong or linear, 0.5–1.5(–2.5) mm wide, discrete to complex–imbricate, margins entire or pectinate–lobulate, ±recurved, particularly at apices. Upper surface smooth, matt, not wrinkled or plicate, without isidia. Lower surface concolorous with upper surface, smooth, matt, glabrous or with minute rhizines. Apothecia scattered to locally crowded, laminal, sessile, 0.1–1(–1.2) mm diam., disc concave to plane to strongly convex and excluding proper exciple, pale orange-brown to red-brown, proper exciple pale yellowish or pinkish white, translucent when wet, thalline exciple thin, minutely lobulate to ±disappearing, concolorous with thallus or ±browned. Epithecium pale yellow-brown, 5–8 μm thick. Hymenium colourless, 75–85 μm tall. Hypothecium opaque, yellow-brown. Ascospores broadly ellipsoidal, apices pointed, 1-septate, slightly constricted at septum, 12.5–15 × 5–7.5 μm.

S: Canterbury (Governor's Bush, Mt Cook), Otago (Makarora Valley, Rees Valley), Southland (Purakino Valley). A small, easily overlooked species (map in Galloway 1999: 325, fig. 4), growing among mosses and other lichens on the trunks of mountain beech (Nothofagus solandri var. cliffortioides) or silver beech (N. menziesii). Also in E Australia and Tasmania (Verdon 1992a: 180; McCarthy 2003c, 2006).

Australasian

Leptogium biloculare is distinguished from all other species of Leptogium by the characteristic 1-septate ascospores (Wilson 1891: pl. XLIX, fig. 8). First recorded in New Zealand from beech forest north of Makarora on the Haast road (Verdon 1990: 429) in a collection made by Mason Hale in 1984.