Cora canari
Cora canari is a rare species of basidiolichen in the family Hygrophoraceae. It was formally described as a new species in 2016 by Freddy Nugra, Manuela Dal Forno, and Robert Lücking. The specific epithet canari refers to the Cañari people of pre-Incan Ecuador. The lichen is only known to occur at the type locality in the Morona-Santiago Province of Ecuador, where it grows as an epiphyte on tree trunks and branches. It forms small rosettes up to 5 cm across with emerald-green to blue-green that have wavy surfaces and thin, rolled-in grey margins.
Taxonomy
Cora canari is a basidiolichen in the family Hygrophoraceae. It was described in 2016 by Lizeth Nugra, Manuela Dal Forno, and Robert Lücking from material collected in the lower montane rain-forest of Morona-Santiago Province, Ecuador. The epithet commemorates the Cañari—one of Ecuador's pre-Incan indigenous nations. ITS sequences place C. canari in a clade that also includes the Colombian species C. setosa and C. undulata and two Galápagos endemics, rather than the superficially similar terrestrial taxa C. hafecesweorthensis and C. imi.Description
The thallus of Cora canari is epiphytic and foliose, forming rosettes up to 5 cm across on bark. It comprises three to five semicircular, 1–2 cm wide and 0.7–1.5 cm long, that are unbranched or only sparsely branched and lack radial sutures. Fresh lobes are aeruginous- to emerald-green, becoming green-grey in the herbarium; the thin, rolled-in margins are grey and. The upper surface is when moist and undulate- on drying, with no concentric colour bands. The lower face does not have a and exposes a white-grey, felty-arachnoid medulla.In section the thallus is 200–250 micrometres thick. A diffusely viaduct-shaped upper cortex, 20–30 μm deep, overlies a 30–70 μm band of hyphae. The is 40–70 μm thick and aeruginous throughout; the medulla is 40–70 μm, hydrophobic, and lacks clamp connections or hyphae. No hymenophore has been observed, and thin-layer chromatography has detected no secondary metabolites.