David Humphries

Hi Island, hope you're well? missed this first time round. Feel free to use these if your still looking for images. The beech is one that Ted Green often shows at Windsor Great Park. He has known it to have Meripulus giganteus colonisation for many years. Couple of others of hornbeam and oak Eifels at various stages of development. This last one is probably just erosion but I think its cool.

I think it’s just frothy rain water caused by a volume of h20 bouncing and dripping off the bark after a significant down pour, no? Bit like when you hold in a full bladder whilst ya busy and then let rip and it bounces off and down what ever your pissing against 😄

Not a great image Peter, we would need a closer image to help see/identify the macro features of the specimen. I wouldn’t hazard a guess based on that image.

Laetiporus sulphureus, chicken of the woods. Laetiporus is a heart wood coloniser of trunk and large branch wood of primarily oak and sweet chestnut. This looks like oak. Merripilus is primarily a root decayer found associating with a wide host range.

the suspected G. carnosum has been assessed at microscopic level and currently can't be seperated from G. lucidum due to fairly similar spore size, although some micro features lean it towards carnosum. A sample is being sent to the Jodrell laboratory at Kew for sequencing to try and determine which it is. Oddly enough there is an American Ganoderma species (G. oregonense) that also shares very similar features and apparantly there is a specimen at Kew that was sequenced to be very close to oregonense. Will update when I hear back. In the meantime, here is Ganoderma lucidum (with Gymnopus fusipes also in attendance) on hornbeam in north London yesterday.

Hello Ken, welcome to Arbtalk. Interesting topic and thanks for sharing your PSP images. Where in the word are you based? Perhaps you have different species of Armillaria than the UK. Which literature do you refer to? My understanding is that Kretschmaria deusta is predominantly a basal wood volume soft rot decayer, which extends and radiates slowly across trunks and can be found in multiple seperate colonies, with the often seen PSP's walling off the seperate territories within the wood against moisture and other fungal species. The more agressive UK species of Armillaria are actively pathogenic, killing off trees by attacking the outer vascular parts of stressed trees but can also be found in cracks and cavities within the wood volumes where I suspect they colonise in a more saprophytic nature. When looking at cross sections of trees that we've felled associated with Armillaria species (with no other known wood decay species present) I don't recall that I've seen exactly the same PSP's like the ones often to be found in trunk cross sections of trees colonised by Kretzschmaria. What we do see sometimes are the sheets of thin black Melanine plaques (made of the same substance as the coating of the rhizomorphs) which protect the mycelium of Armillaria sp on the walls of cavities, cracks within the wood volume and behind dead bark. I suspect these are protection barriers against moisture, air temperature and other fungal species and fungivores, but not in the same way that Kretzschmaria lay down their PSP barrier zones which I'd believe are possibly created chemically. The following images are of a dead horse chestnut that had these Melanine sheets/plaques behind bark and in cavities and cracks.

Fail !

On a tip off from another Arb I went to go see a better specimen of Ganoderma carnosum than the one I posted at the start of this thread. Its on a yew in a churchyard close to where I work. Going to collect some spore to get a positive micro Ident.

What are the black rolls, some kind of root barrier installation? Any idea what the actual girth on that one is?

Probably G. australe on holm oak Wells next the sea, north Norfolk

Luv them ladders don’t ya ! 😄

Cheers Al, appreciate that.

Is that Laetiporus popping out of the trunk Al? Red oak? Would like to see the tomograph if the clients ok with that?

Not great shots as this Marsh Harrier literally flew out of the reeds right next to us and didn't give me much notice to get the camera set. Burnham Overy, north Norfolk.

Polyporus (Cerioporus) squamosus, the dryads saddle