Accolade for lichen quilts, mosaics, brocades

ANOTHER LIFE:TWICE SHORN OF its leaves by this year's salty storms, the ash tree outside the window has had a difficult season. Stripped to a basic anatomy, its trunk, biceps and knotty limbs glistening from days of ocean mist and drizzle, this muscular middleweight braces for the next round from the Atlantic.

Still far too young at 21 to show the ridges and fissures of old age, the tree’s smooth trunk catches the eye nonetheless, its brocade of grey and old-gold lichens positively glowing on a murky autumn day. These are not the leafy or whiskery lichens that drape the west’s Atlantic oakwoods but flat patches and medallions stitched in a quilt or mosaic. Some seem to be sprinkled with hidden messages or maps for hidden treasure (Graphis scripta, for example).

They are ecologically interesting, without a doubt – that tangled marriage of fungal filaments and algal cells, the pioneering reach to frosty Arctic rocks, the insistence on totally clean air – but the appeal of lichens, for me, is mainly aesthetic. Go to Paul Whelan’s great website, irishlichens.ie, and enjoy the flaming discs of Caloplaca, the red-hot wands of fruiting Cladonia, the rich textures, patterns and fractal forms of Ireland’s 1,000-odd species. Along with our seaweeds and wings of moths, Ireland’s lichens should inspire designers of everything from high-fashion fabrics to lampshades.

In the past, when so much of natural history was the intellectual property of men, study of the lesser plants tended to be left to women. But I like to think her pioneering work on Irish lichens gave Ballymena’s Matilda Cullen Knowles (1864-1933) quite as much aesthetic as botanical satisfaction. Along with her books, the hundreds of specimens she collected and pressed set Irish lichenology on its way.

Today, we are still filling gaps in the inventories of our natural world. The 32-county Lichen Ireland project, begun in 2005 and now adding in the last rarities, has amassed more than 137,200 records from 990 10km squares.

Sponsored by environment agencies north and south of the Border, the project recruited Britain’s leading lichenologists to help map the distribution of species, their laborious “square-bashing” probing every likely quarry and churchyard as well as more natural topographies of rock and bark. (See lichen.ie.)

Such visitors have long been drawn to the chance of rare species new to science. A trio in 1980 (Hawksworth, Coppins and James) discovered, for example, one they called Blarneya hibernica, a really quite modest lichen growing at the base of old oak trees in the southwest and resembling little blobs of squashed cotton wool.

But the state of the Irish countryside can still surprise. Neil Sanderson, a landscape ecologist with the British Lichen Society, has reported on the Lichen Ireland project in the journal British Wildlife. “The degree of disruption of the landscape in the last 400 years,” he writes, “is high and all-pervasive . . . In most areas, finding woodland with continuity [and] veteran trees is impossible.” Sanderson was impressed, nonetheless, by an “example of temperate rainforest” at Hanging Rock in Co Fermanagh, where a single old ash tree, clinging to a limestone cliff, holds Ireland’s only population (so far) of a crustose, “script” lichen called Enterographa elaborata, one of a mainly tropical family with only about 30 species.

The extreme oceanic microclimate supporting rare lichens on rocks around a chain of tarns high on Mount Brandon, in Co Kerry, also, as Sanderson sees it, “mimics the ancient Celtic rainforest”. A colleague, John Douglass, found similar conditions in an ancient remnant hazelwood hidden within the conifers at Ards Forest Park, in Co Donegal. “Further exciting discoveries will certainly be made,” says Sanderson.

The same could no doubt be said of the world’s seaweeds, but the range and beauty of the commoner red, brown or green species were never more splendidly and accessibly offered than in a new guide from Germany, translated by Ireland’s leading phycologist, Prof Michael Guiry, who taught botany at NUI Galway for more than 30 years. (A student, Fiona Kellerer, helped with the translation.)

Seaweeds is a robust fistful of 600 pages (€59.80 from koeltz.com), and is the work of Prof Wolfram Braune, who travelled the world to photograph specimens. Together with images from Dr Guiry’s internationally known archive, algaebase.org, they offer outstanding portraits of the ocean’s plants as they shade from green to red in deepening water.

One revelation is the structural similarity, from one shore to another, of plants shaped by the turbulent energies of the sea, while their global variations are often subtle and exquisite. Braune’s introduction finds room for Matisse’s inspiration from seaweed, and offers his own examples of “sublime and graceful beauty”, among them species of Ireland’s own rocks and pools. See seaweed.ie.

Eye on nature

We saw a ladybird on the garden fence outside our home on October 3rd. It was bright and sunny at the time. Is it not unusual to see ladybirds in the countryside in October?

Angela Leahy, Kells, Co Kilkenny

This autumn was not yet cold enough for the ladybirds to hibernate. They will disappear later.

On Inis Meáin, on October 3rd, we came across two fat, predominantly black caterpillars, about two and a half inches long. The surrounding area was devoid of flowers or vegetation. We wondered what they could have been feeding on, and why they are so late in the season.

Frances Van Velzen, Goatstown, Dublin 14

The caterpillars are those of the fox moth. They feed on heather, bramble, bilberry and other low-growing plants. They are fully grown now and will soon go into hibernation.

We found a spider with extremely long legs and a small body in the bathroom and have not been able to identify it.

Madeleine Gaughan, Blackrock, Co Dublin

It is a daddy-long-legs spider, Pholcus phalangioides, from your photograph. It hangs from a flimsy web, and when insects fly into the web they are secured by more silk thrown over them by the spider’s legs.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or e-mail viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address