Amandinea conglomerata
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| Amandinea conglomerata | |
|---|---|
Scientific classification  | |
| Kingdom: | Fungi |
| Division: | Ascomycota |
| Class: | Lecanoromycetes |
| Order: | Caliciales |
| Family: | Caliciaceae |
| Genus: | Amandinea |
| Species: | A. conglomerata |
| Binomial name | |
| Amandinea conglomerata | |
 Holotype: Bristol Point, Jervis Bay Territory, Australia | |
Amandinea conglomerata is a species of crustose lichen in the family Caliciaceae.[1] and found in New South Wales. It is confined to wave-washed sandstone and andesite outcrops along the south-eastern coast of Australia, where its minute black fruit bodies form tight clusters that help to distinguish it from superficially similar species. This maritime specialist grows on hard rock surfaces that are regularly splashed by seawater but dry between tides, sharing its habitat with other salt-tolerant lichens. The species can be distinguished from similar lichens by its oil-filled spore layer and the way its fruiting bodies merge together into cushion-like clusters as they age.
The species was described in 2013 by the Australian lichenologists John Elix and Gintaras Kantvilas during a revision of the buellioid lichens of coastal New South Wales and the adjacent Jervis Bay Territory.[2] The holotype, collected at Bristol Point on the Beecroft Peninsula at an elevation of just 1 metre, comprises a thin, partly immersed thallus on wave-exposed rocks. Elix and Kantvilas coined the epithet conglomerata ('crowded together') to reflect the tendency of old apothecia to coalesce into cushion-like agglomerations.[2]
Although chemical spot tests reveal either no lichen products or, rarely, traces of norstictic acid, morphology and spore anatomy set the taxon apart from its closest look-alike, Amandinea pelidna.[2] Later work confirmed that the species also differs sharply from the coastal taxon Amandinea variabilis in having an inspersed hymenium, numerous sessile apothecia that become convex-to-tuberculate with age, and markedly smaller, often septum-constricted Buellia-type ascospores.[3] In A. conglomerata the one-septate spores are slightly narrower (5–7 μm wide), initially of the Pachysporaria-type and only later assuming the Buellia-type outline, and they are usually pinched at the internal wall; in addition, the hymenium is heavily suffused with oil droplets, a feature virtually absent from A. pelidna.[2] Another lookalike is A. brussei, but this South African lichen differs in lacking calcium oxalate in the medulla, and it has longer ascospores measuring 13–18 μm long.[4]