Fungi Friday 🍄

Happy Fungi Friday! 🍄

In September I visited Downpatrick Head on the North Mayo coast, to see the famous sea stack (header image).

It was extremely blustery so I couldn’t spend too much time near the cliff edge trying to get a good view of the sea stack.

Something else caught my eye, on the remaining foundations of an old chapel belonging to St. Patrick.

Forgive me, father, but the lichens caught my eye.

It’s only since submitting the photos to iNaturalist that I’ve learned what they are.

They have the nice name of ‘sea ivory’, Ramalina siliquosa.

Ramalina is a cool family of lichens that are seemingly more common in western (and wetter) parts of Britain and Ireland.

This species is identified from another similar one by the black margins of the cups, which you may be able to see here.

There were beautiful patchworks of lichen on the rocks here.

I enjoyed the squished cups of this crustose lichen.

This rather bleached phone pic is purportedly of Anaptychia runcinata. Here’s a page from the Irish Lichens website on it. Can’t we find a common name for this? Patrick’s burnt omlette or something.

Thanks for reading.