Notes: Found under three-needle pine, and black oak, in the duff. At about 3800 ft. elevation.
These are a weird one. quite a good collection of these was found, about 2 dozen bodies. These are bright lime-green when young, and become tan-yellow as they age. The caps are rugulose, at all ages, and never striate. Not sure, but they don’t appear hygrophanous, but that is hard to tell with the color changes, and rough surface.
We put these under the scope quickly, and confirmed that they are Conocybe. We were able to see much in the way of caulocystidia though. What we did see what very small and randomly shaped, about only 10um long. Although from the photos it looks like caulocystidia have to be there.
Mike Wood mentioned that ones like these were also obs. the week before from the Yosemite valley. But he couldn’t find any photos of them, and I don’t see any records of them in the Yosemite collections that have been listed so far.
With the distinctive features of these, they really look like a strange new species of Conocybe.
7/20/2010 – Getting back to adding some micro-details.
The first micro-shot is of the gill edge at 400x in Meltzer’s. The lecythiform cheilocystidia are obvious, and this is clearly a Conocybe. Also along with this no pleurocystidia were obs., the basidia were 4-spored, also separated by spacer cells, and no reactions to Meltzer’s were obs. anywhere (spores or tissues).
The second micro-shot is on a section of cap surface at 400x in Meltzer’s. The cap sruface here is curious, not quite clearly cellular as you would expect. It is a randomize surface of inflated and filiform hyphae, more of less lying down on the surface. I would expect the clear hymeniform surface for Conocybe, but this one is weird. Not clearly cellular or not. No surface gelatin was obs.
The third micro-shot is of the stipe surface near the apex at 400x in KOH. Here you can a clump of caulocystidia. There are multiple kinds of cystidia there, some clavate, some lageniform and wavy, and many long filiform.
The forth micro-shot is of some spores from the stipe surface at 1000x in KOH. Here the spores are smooth, ellipsoid, brown and with a germ pore. They are quite large, roughly 18 um long.
With this they seem to be at least in the section Candidae of Conocybe, which makes them related to the Conocybe apala variations. But these seem to clearly be a new undescribed species. Unless someone else can point out a published descriptions of these.
