Neoprotoparmelia capensis

The lichen is saxicolous (rock-dwelling) and forms a grey to pale- or dark-brown crust up to about 8 cm across. Young parts are thin and neatly areolate—broken into tiny polygonal patches—while older areas become warted or partly squamulose and may reach 2.2 mm thick. A locally gelatinised outer layer often gives the surface a whitish mottled, fissured aspect. The thallus may be bordered by a narrow black hypothallus line, but this is sometimes absent.^[2]

Apothecia (the spore-producing cups) are frequent, one to several per areole. When young they are immersed and urn-shaped; with age they expand to more or less sessile discs up to 2 mm wide whose brown to almost black centre is surrounded by a persistent, thallus-coloured rim. Internally, the proper exciple is cup-shaped and richly gelatinised; the hymenium is 60–75 μm tall, with branched paraphyses whose tips are sheathed in brown mucilage. Eight-spored asci measure 42–70 × 12–20 μm and are of the Lecanora-type. Colourless, single-celled ascospores are fusiform to narrowly ellipsoid, 9–14 × 3.5–6 μm, a few bearing a tiny hyaline hair at one end. Immersed pycnidia are common; they release straight, rod-shaped conidia 7–17 × 1–1.5 μm. Spot tests give KC+ (dirty rose-red) and UV+ (green-white) reactions, and thin-layer chromatography shows alectoronic acid as the major secondary metabolite with traces of its derivatives; atranorin is present only in vestigial amounts.^[2]

Neoprotoparmelia capensis is known solely from its type locality in the arid north-western Cape Region of South Africa, within the succulent Karoo biome. It grows on exposed coastal sandstones only a few metres above sea level, where fog and salt-laden winds alternate with intense sunshine. The lichen shares its habitat with a diversity of drought-adapted succulents, but no other populations have yet been discovered despite targeted searches, suggesting that the species may be a Cape endemic with an extremely restricted range.^[2]