Article

Additions to the Myxomycota of summer rainfall regions of tropical Australia

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  • Botanic Gardens of Sydney
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Abstract

The myxomycete diversity is poorly known in tropical regions of Australia. We present a list of myxomycetes from the summer rainfall regions of tropical Australia collated from field collections from the wet tropics of Queensland (February 2009) and from the Kimberley region of Western Australia (February 2006, January 2010, May 2011), together with moist chamber cultures of substrates from the Kimberley region collected in October 2004, September 2005, March 2009, July 2009 and January 2010. Sixty six species and two varieties were named, together with a further 12 that could not be identified with confidence. One species, Licea xanthospora, has been recently described from the Kimberley region, and a further seven species (Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa var. arbuscula, Diderma indicum, Macbrideola argentea, Paradiacheopsis longipes, Physarum echinosporum, Reticularia splendens, and Stemonaria longa) are new records for Australia. One species (Physarella oblonga) recorded from Australia in the 19th century but which had been lost, was recollected.

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... Most of the work to date in natural habitats has been in describing all species, finding which species are present in what substrates, and investigating which environmental variables affect the presence of a species, with each paper generally considering a single climatic area. Previous work on Australian myxomycetes with this objective consists of Ing and Spooner (1994), Mitchell (1995), McHugh et al. (2003), Black et al. (2004), Jordan et al. (2006), Rosing et al. (2007), Davison et al. (2008Davison et al. ( , 2017, Wrigley de Basanta et al. (2008), McHugh et al. (2009), Stephenson and Shadwick (2009), Knight and Brims (2010), Lloyd (2014), and Wellman (2017). ...
... Most samples were collected at least a month after the last rainfall. In Western (2015), traverses C and E by Wellman (2016) and B is site 10-12 of Davison et al. (2017). Contours give the distribution of the annual average rainfall in mm/year (BOM 2017). ...
... The myxomycete records within the transition zones are recorded as follows: if the species is present in both species associations then a record in the transition zone is put in the closest species association, if the record is found in only one of the species associations then all the records within the transition zone are allocated to that species association. The Davison et al. (2017). Column 12 is a composite sample of the temperate areas of SW of Western Australia combining the records of the traverse (Table S4), of Jordan et al. (2006) from Banksia bark for two sites, and spot samples of sites 19, 23-25 and 28 of McHugh et al. (2009). ...
Article
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... Taxonomically, C. fruticulosa was described with other various descriptions as varieties in the species. Previously, C. arbuscula was described as a variety in C. fruticulosa [16,18,19]. Then, based on the Index Fungorum [6], the name of C. arbuscula was noted as a species in Ceratiomyxa. ...
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A white tubular Myxomycota is identic to the Ceratiomyxa genus. Ceratiomyxa has five sporangium types such as a simple pillar, fruticulus, arbuscula, filliforme, and porioides. Slime mold as Ceratiomyxa was found at IPB University. The specimen was coded as Tub1. The specimen Tub1 was found on the rotten wood and together colonized the wood as a substrate with other fungi, such as Sphaerobolus stellatus and Lentinus sajor-caju. The morphological observation was conducted, such as sporangium type, sporangium color, spore size, spore shape, and spore position of the sporangium. To identify the species, phenetic analysis was conducted for five species of Ceratiomyxa and Stemonitis fusca as an outgroup. All characters were transferred into binner data. Then, the SAHN cladogram was built using Numerical Taxonomy System (NTSys) software. The SAHN cladogram showed that Ceratiomyxa specimen Tub1 was identified as Ceratiomyxa arbuscula with a 100% similarity coefficient. The morphology supported the identification, such as the shape of arbuscula sporangium and the spore size.
... For Fuligo species, only F. septica has been listed from Panama without differentiating between the typical yellow and deviating white and reddish forms (Martin 1938;Standley 1933;Welden 1954). Farr (1976) considered these forms as conspecific, whereas in other publications these forms are separated on the level of species or infraspecific taxa (Chen et al. 2005;Davison et al. 2017;Kryvomaz et al. 2017;Neubert et al. 1995;Poulain et al. 2011). While F. candida is distinguished by its white color, there are deviating concepts for F. rufa (Neubert et al. 1995). ...
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