Fringed Chocolate Chip Lichen

What a find! I decided to take a break from work while I was out exploring Sugarloaf to prep for a weekend class I'm bringing there. So, I made my way up to one of the rivers in the area. The rocks were really cool here, but I didn't have very high hopes for finding any interesting plants or lichens. I hadn't really seen many of the lichens that I would expect to see in a habitat like this. I was on somewhat of a time-crunch to get back and told myself that I'd turn around after 10 more minutes of walking up the river. The time passed, but there was a section of rock that jutted out a little further and looked promising. I told myself I would turn around after I reached that point.

Thank goodness that I pushed back on my self imposed time limit. The wall right before the rock jutted out caught my eye as it looked quite moist and shaded. There were plenty of mosses, liverworts, and Nostoc communities growing on it. Intermixed with all this was fringed chocolate chip lichen (Solorina spongiosa). A species that before this moment was only known from one location in MN, growing in a similar habitat along another river a few dozen miles away from here. John Thayer found that population in 2021. This species usually has an arctic-alpine distribution. Like I said I was on a time-crunch so turned around after this amazing find, maybe sometime soon I'll return to see if I can locate any more clusters. 

To me this lichen doesn't even look like it should exist. It has a very similar look to the more common common chocolate chip lichen with a concave apothecia at the center. Around the apothecia is a typical looking thallus containing a green algae photobiont. Then it gets weird, this "regular" thallus only extends a small distance and then is replaced by squamulose cephalodia which house Nostoc (a cyanobacteria) as the photobiont. Strange!

Fringed chocolate chip lichen (Solorina spongiosa)
State Watchlist Species - Newly Discovered

A single lichen - notice the narrow band of thallus surrounding the apothecia with cephalodia forming a ring around it

It was fairly abundant here

Zooming out on the habitat 

Free-living Nostoc colonies were abundant on the rock wall

Compare to common chocolate chip lichen (Solorina saccata) found at a nearby river

Some of the other finds of the day from closer up the river:

Elegant sunburst lichen (Rusavskia elegans)

Sugared sunburst lichen (Rusavskia sorediata)

Poplar rust (Melampsora medusae) on a balsam poplar

Poplar powdery mildew (Erysiphe adunca) on the same poplar

Blackthread lichen (Placynthium nigrum)

Chewing gum lichen (Proroblastenia rupestris)

Rock dimple lichen (Gyalecta jenensi)










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