Xanthoria

Today was the start of a couple of fascinating days.  I am spending them on a Cumbria Wildlife Trust course Lichens for beginners.  I always thought Lichens were a simple matter of a symbiosis between a fungus and an alga.  Now I find out it could be fungus and cyanobacterium and recent research has also found yeasts associated with some lichens.

We spent the morning trying to get to grips with the technical terms and the basic structure and the after lunch headed up to Eycott Hill Reserve.  We found a large number of species many of which I hadn't noticed before.

Xanthoria was a genus I thought I could recognise.  I was wrong we found at least one other species which was very similar.  However I will (as a blipper I follow has done today) tentatively offer the identification for this as Xanthoria parietina.