S.O.U.S.es

Day 259: If you've seen "The Princess Bride," you will probably recall Buttercup and Wesley's encounter with the R.O.U.S.es ("Rodents Of Unusual Size"). Note, please, that "unusual" is not synonymous with "enormous," although in the case of the Rodents, that was its meaning. "Unusual" means "out of the ordinary," and that was certainly applicable to a strange growth I discovered on a short length of dead salmonberry stem. I'd been angling around to get the best image of yesterday's Streptopus when it caught my eye. Initially, I took it for a slime mold, and got all excited at the prospect of adding yet another species to Mount Rainier National Park's growing list, but when I looked more closely, I wasn't quite convinced. The tiny dots, the largest of which would have been well under 1 mm, appeared to be concave. "Lichen apothecia?" I said aloud. My naked eye couldn't tell, so a small piece followed me home to go under the microscope, and what I saw there was definitely a surprise. Orange disks were ringed by a fringe of eyelash-like rooting hairs. What I had found was fungal: a Scutellinia of some sort. Accessible information on Scutellinia species is very limited, so after a period of searching for one which was both tiny and grows on Rubus, I had narrowed the options down to one: Scutellinia erinaceus, but I wasn't confident in the ID. I sent the photo off to my contact at the Burke Herbarium, who in turn forwarded it to a mycology expert, and she came back with the same conclusion, although with the same degree of hesitation I felt. Erinaceus or not, it is definitely a S.O.U.S. (Scutellinia Of Unusual Size). And from here on out, I will be paying a lot closer attention to dead salmonberry stems.