After doing bits and pieces around the house on Saturday morning, I headed out looking to add to my PSL challenge, this time tackling the monad immediately east of my home monad, looking to add mainly fungi, bryophytes and lichens to the squares list, keeping an eye out for any avian year ticks - in particular the very invisible Fieldfares.
I was quite successful in adding over 50 species to the monad's list. Amongst these were a couple of lifers.
First lifer was the micro fungi, Phragmocephala atra. This is a micro fungi of dead Nettle stems, found when checking the Nettels for the much commoner Leptosphaeria acuta. Mark had posted about P. atra on Facebook a couple of years ago, but I couldn't find any at that time. They look like short, dark, stiff hairs erupting from the stem, but when they are fresh they have a "pompom" head, which makes them quite distinctive.
The second lifer was also a new family for me. Bristletails, Machilidae. Thanks to a recent post on Facebook by Christian Sparrow Owens, providing a photo reference for bristletails, when I spotted one, I felt that I might be able to identify to species level, so grabbed a few pics. A quick perusal of the reference photo's were enough to convince me that I had Dilta chateri. I did, however, post it up on Facebook and Christian agreed the id.
The key features to look for are the relatively short antennae and the solid dark band across the rear of the "hump". At this time of year this band is paler than during summer months.
This species appears to be restricted to Wales. In fact the NBN atlas has only 14 records for this species and all within south Wales.
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