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4th March

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A pleasant conclusion to a couple of months' patience.

Today's images were taken with the Fuji 2800z in conjunction with my Olympus microscope.

Dry with some sun.

The Peltigeras - or Dog Lichens - (sample here) are leafy, membranous lichens with conspicuous orange fruiting bodies. These produce pure fungal spores. The spore must come into contact with the appropriate symbiotic alga in order to start the life-cycle of another lichen specimen. Lichens are known to be reluctant to spore in captivity, so I'm quite pleased with these images.

The left hand image shows the long, pencil-like spores under 100x magnification. The right hand image is taken at 400x. The spores are approximately 50 microns long by 4 microns wide.

    

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