Dare I Say "Transcendens?"

 

Day 34: I am going to go waaaaay out on a limb here (because I haven't done any chemical testing) to assert that this is a specimen of Cladonia transcendens. There are not many red-fruiting Cladonias in western Washington, and I can rule out bellidiflora because of the absence of abundant squamules on the podetia, and I can eliminate macilenta by the overall yellowish tinge (macilenta leans toward blue). The one specimen of "Cladonia cristatella" in the WTU Herbarium is a misidentification. Cristatella ("British Soldiers") does not occur in the Pacific Northwest. Cladonias are notoriously difficult to identify even with chemical testing, and it's not often that you find one with a morphology which strongly suggests one species over another as it seems to me that it does here. I could be wrong. I might even say that there's a high likelihood that I am wrong, that it's a species which doesn't show up in any of my field guides. But that's the thing about science. You can be wrong without any shame. In fact, if a scientist can't admit when they're wrong, they're in the wrong profession.