Cedar Cups in Sidmouth

Earlier on in the winter I spotted a nice Cedar tree in a park in Sidmouth Town centre. I thought it looked an ideal place to find Cedar Cup come the spring. There was a slight problem though, Cedar Cup is a rare fungus in the southwest with very few records. I thought it would be worth checking though and so last Sunday that's what I did. I could hardly believe my eyes when I found some almost immediately! Ten fruiting bodies in total but unfortunately not in the best condition as there is a plague of Squirrels in the park and they had been tucking into them. All the pointed rays around the rims had been nibbled off. Hopefully when the weather warms up a bit they might fruit a bit more and I'll catch them before the squirrels do!

I couldn't see that there were any records for this species in Devon and so contacted the county recorder with my find. He had seen them once in Devon at Exeter University and so mine was only the second record for them in Devon. It could be one of those species which isn't actually that rare, just under recorded. How many people go out looking under all the Cedar trees they can at this time of year? Well there's me, so that's one...

A Blue Atlas Cedar with plenty of bare earth beneath looked the ideal candidate for Cedar Cups.

 

This one is just beginning to open up. They start off as underground spheres and push up to the surface and open up into several irregular rays. The inner surface which is the spore bearing surface is grey or milky white.The outer surface seen here is brown and fibrous.

Opening up

Fully open but with only one ray remaining.

There are teeth marks visible on this one!

The county recorder suggested I take a look at the spores because they are quite distinctive being very large. So I dusted off the old microscope and did just that. Here they are. I can't verify the size as I don't have a calibrated measure on my microscope but they were easily visible at just 40x magnification which does indeed make them large for fungal spores. For the record they are 330 - 370µm x 16 - 22µm

40x

The spores are within the asci which are long and cylindrical. There are 8 pores in each ascus and you can just make them out at this magnification . The obvious circles are oil droplets within the spore. The spores are ellipsoidal fusiform (eye-shaped)

  All more clearly seen here at 100x

400x 

1000x