Algae and Lichens for beginners - Malham to Gordale 2012

I sold £17.25 worth of cards for the Rain Forest Fund
on this walk I led on Sat 8 Sept for Plantlife ..
so surely that justifies a write up here on this blog!
Only four people were able to come. I dedicate this post to the several other people who did not make it.

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Algae and Lichens Walk

Looking at Nostoc in front of
Malham Yorkshire Dales National Park Centre

An annual celebration of our place in the cosmos...

We start by looking at "Blue-Greens"..
(also known as Blue-green Algae, Blue-Green Bacteria or Cyanobacteria)
We start by looking at Nostoc in front of the Malham Yorkshire Dales National Park  Centre

Nostoc is a Blue-green growing in the spaces between the limestone cobbles.
When dry it looks like black dried up sheep droppings, or dried tar. 
When wet it looks like dark black-green jelly.. or ... black wet sheep droppings. 
And everyone except us (the Algae group) ignores it.

Piece of Nostoc on hand.

The Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago..
There was no life ..
No oxygen.
Only gases such as methane.

 4.2 billion years ago organisms similar to Blue-Greens formed in the sea.
They have tiny cells (5µ long) and the genetic material is mixed up in the cell.
(Most "modern cells", of organisms known as "Eukaryotes" which includes everything from sea-weeds to fungi, worms to humans, have the genetic material in the nucleus separated from the rest of the cytoplasm of the cell by a membrane)

These Blue-greens lived there for  2 billion years
- 2 billion years
- nearly half the life of our planet.
Nothing but Blue-greens. (Well almost)
They began to produce oxygen.
And after 2 billion years
there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere
for other plants as we know them to begin to evolve

We owe a lot to blue-greens. "Come out and join us and see the Nostoc!" I say to the information man at the National Park Centre.
He comes -- but

Oh dear!
They have weeded and cleaned the cobbles.
"Two weeks ago" he says

Never mind. There is bound to be some left.

And there is!!.

"Crachats de lune" - Spittle of the moon
"Crachats de diable" - Spittle of the devil.
Named as such in France because it appears to fall from the sky overnight..

We have no English name for it..

Last week I was in the Netherlands at a conference of  ECEN. We held a meditation, showing the History of the Universe.. by making a spiral and the candles showed when events happened.
The Universe is 13.75 billion years old.
Just think .. it took 9.25 billion years until the earth formed..
and then there was 2 billion years whilst the blue-greens worked away eventually producing oxygen.. till other life could evolve.

The Blue-green period lasted 1/7 th the age of the Universe.

.. How I wish those people at ECEN could be with us on this sunny day in Yorkshire looking at Nostoc..

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Nostoc grows in chains of cells. Occasionally a larger cell is seen in the chain called a Heterocyst. These cells are  special because the can fix atmospheric nitrogen to make nitrate fertilizer.

Nostoc occurs in several lichens. A lichen is an association of an alga (which can photosynthesise and capture the suns energy and make sugars) and a fungus (which cannot make its own sugars - but which gives the lichen structure and which can collect nutrients from the substtatum) -
It occurs in Jelly Lichens (Collema) - which we found in several places.
It occurs in black streaks on the cliffs at Malham Cove and Gordale Scar -
resembling  the soot left by Tom the Water-Baby as he scrambled down a cliff..

Rivularia "buttons" 5cm across,
in the foreground  in Gordale Beck

I could tell you long tales about the other Blue-greens we saw -
Gloeocapsa on the millstone grit capstone of the church wall,
Ossilatoria which can "swim" (will wriggle/float) to the surface of puddles
Rivularia which makes little buttons on pebbles in shallow lime rich streams
but there isn't time.





I could tell you long tales of the birds we saw:
Spotted fly catcher flitting out of the tree and back
Green wood pecker yaffling as its green back shot from the field down to the wood
Sparrow hawk searching for prey
Raven/Buzzard high above Gordale waterfall

Grey Dagger Moth Caterpillar -
Acronicta psi - will overwinter as pupa

I could tell you tales of the butterflies we saw
Peacock
Small tortoiseshell
Grey Dagger-moth  caterpillar

I could tell you tales of the Grass-like plants we saw
Festulilium-loliacium
Festuca arundinacea
Eleocharis palustris
Bromopsis.. could it possibly be benekenii?
Typha latifolia

I could tell you tales of the geology we saw
The Mid Craven Fault, Limestone, Shale, Reef Knolls, Tufa, Travertine.

I could tell you tales of the people we saw

The transformation and joy as a teenage Pakistani dressed girl, in best longish pretty dress, black trousers, flat canvas shoes and  headscarf carefully tiptoed up the boulders in the stream, holding up her skirt,  following her two younger brothers..... then abandoned keeping her feet dry and ran in the stream laughing... later photographed by her father using (a sign of 2012.. an Ipad/small tablet.

The friendly chat with local artist Katharine Holmes

Our own enjoyment at stall at the Gordale Bridge as we sat on green chairs in the sun and dappled tree shade eating ice-cream and local beef sandwiches

Learning about the different types
 of lichens growing on the
National  Park table

And I could tell you tales of the 20 or so lichens we saw. and how we learned about the different types of lichen - crustose, leprose etc..

Haematococcus
pluviatilis

and the six other ordinary (i.e. non-blue-green) algae - Cladophora, Klebsormidium, Pleurococcus, Haematococcus, Trentepohlia, Diatoms each with its own story
 - but that will all have to wait for another time...

Trentepohlia an orange coloured
filamentous alga

or better come out on a walk with us!

Pointing to the Cladophora glomerata  in Gordale Beck

On the way home I drove through a corner of Plantlife Nature Reserve of Winskill Stones and took a quick photo. Thank you to my Plantlife friends who accompanied me today.. If you had not come, the walk would not have taken place..








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August Flowers and Bees at Lower Winskill Farm

Today I visited Lower Winskill Farm. Tom Lord was keen to show me the Field Gentians that he had been shown last week. Usually I visit in May and June. It was fascinating to see the difference two month's later - two months of a very wet summer.

In the ungrazed limestone pasture/meadows the Knapweed had grown extraordinarily well. It was in full flower (100m lower by the road to Settle it is over) (This year it has all come at once" said Tom.

We started off from his farm accompanied by Tanya St Pierre who would be running a workshop on bees at the weekend.

She was delighted by the abundance of Knapweed and bees on it, even on this very humid grey day.

Honey bee

Hoverfly - must look this up

Bombus terrestris    Buff-tailed Bumble Bee   http://www.bumblebee.org/terr.htm

Arachnid

We walked further north into the pasture that leads towards Stainforth.

We found several plants of Grass of Parnassus - Tom has not seen them in this field before.
Is this because he has reduced grazin - or because we have had a very wet summer?

The we came to what we were looking for. First some Autumn Gentian - Relatively Common at this time of year on shallow grassland on limestone

And then just a few plants of the Field Gentian. It has four petals and two big sepals overlapping two small sepals.

An interesting fungus on the way back.

Poa palustris - Swamp Meadow-grass

Grass of the Month for July 2012

(See other months' grasses)

Swamp Meadow-grass is rare. It was introduced to this country.

It is similar to Wood Meadow-grass Poa nemoralis in that the shoots are very slender and rounded.

The spikelets small and scattered. The leaves look flat and it is hard to see their boat-shaped tips.

So like P nemoralis, the leaves look a bit like an Agrostis - though in this case it would be Agrostis gigantea, becasue the shoots are tall - but still very slender and gangly. The Swamp Meadow-grass grows amongst reeds which holds it up

The key difference between palustris and nemoralis is that the former has a long ligule and the latter a short one.. In fact at Leighton Moss this month I thought I had found some P nemoralis .. until I realised it had a very long ligule.

Both places I have seen it are RSPB Nature Reserves, and in both cases beside a path/boards/bridge amongst the Reeds. - At Loch of Kinnordy near Kirriemuir, and at Leighton Moss

(See other months' grasses)

Poa compressa - Flattened Meadow-grass

Grass of the Month for August 2012

(See other months' grasses)

Poa compressa is rare around Settle. Settle is more or less in the centre of mainland Britain so you see we are getting to the northern edge of its distribution.

Around here it grows on very thin limestone soil... in fact on almost bare ground.




The shoots are much more compressed than the common Poa trivialis and Poa pratensis. It has short rhizomes/trailing shoots- though as it grows on bare rock they cannot grow under ground.  the first internode grows almost horizontally then the next one at an angle - in fact the whole shoot is often at an angle.  It forms thin tufts.. As it is growng on bare rock such a substratum cannot support a dense tuft.

The head is small and compact compared to P trivialis and P pratensis.. and flattened.

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The rest of this post rambles on about all the places I have found this rather inconsequential small ting grass.   (Go  to the index for other grasses if you'd rather..  or will you die of curiosity if you don't read where I've found it.?)

I was first shown it on the gravel near Settle Railway Station over 30 years ago, but that land got built on or tarmacked over and the flower beds covered with woodchip.


Sometimes we used to find it (20 years ago) on the limestone in the quarried area adjacent to the

25/09/2007

obelisk at Gait Barrows Reserve.

I saw it on a deserted railway between Skipton and Colne 20 years ago.

I saw it on a wall beside a track leading north of Stainforth down to the river.

(Isn't it amazing that such a small, often dried up plant can have so much space devoted to it!)

For the past ten years till two years ago I took my students to see it on the traffic island at the junction of the north end of Settle Bypass.

25/09/2007

25/09/2007

25/09/2007

But it hasn't been there the last two years - maybe it got too dry. Or the herbicide finally killed it off.

However, during Open Gardens last year I discovered a patch on someone's drive in Stainforth.

Hurray!

I went back and photographed it this April . Much of it was very dead - you could see the prostrate mat of last years shoots. But new shoots were coming through

See it does like growing on stony ground

(See other months' grasses)

Klebsormidium crenulatum - filamentous green alga on CCG walk

On 28th July Craven Conservation Group went for a walk to Ryeloaf Hill.

we were just about one mile east of Settle, a field above the old reservoir, and had to climb a stile. (we were south of South Craven Fault - just - so on millstone grit.

Look at the Klebsormidium on the rock