Diderma crustaceum
Peck
Description:
SPOROCARPS: confluent, clustered, or scattered, short-stalked or sessile, globose, 0.7 to 2 mm. diam., smooth and white from the thick, fragile, deciduous crust of loosely compacted crystals of lime in which they are enclosed; when the crust has fallen away the sporangia appear reniform or hemispherical and gray; sporangial wall membranous, colorless, clothed with large stellate crystals of lime.

STALK: pale bufl", 0.2 to 0.4 mm. high, slender, membranous, several often clustered together on an expansion of the membranous hypothallus, at first concealed under the crust of lime surrounding the sporangia.

COLUMELLA: small, irregular, depressed, hardly evident in the sessile forms, white or pale buff, with rather scanty deposits of lime in the form of nodules.

CAPILLITIUM: consisting of colorless or pale violet branching threads, 0.5-1 µm diam., often with minute fusiform thickenings.

NOTES: First New Zealand record of this.

SPORES: Spores purplish gray, strongly
spinulose, 10 - 13 µm diam.

PLASMODIUM: White.
HABITAT: On dead leaves and twigs.

DISTRIBUTION: Cosmopolitan, Auckland.
Macro images:
Diderma crustaceum
Scale bar
Scale= 2.8 mm.
 
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Scale bar
Scale= 2.8 mm.
 
Diderma crustaceum
Scale bar
Scale= 2.8 mm.
 
Diderma crustaceum
Scale bar
Scale= 2.8 mm.
 
Diderma crustaceum
Scale bar
Scale= ? mm.
PLASMODIUM:
 
 
Hidden Forest
Slime Moulds