TASMANIA: near Fern Tree, May 1912, L. Rodway, Typus in Herb. Tasmanian Museum.

Apothecia gregarious, superficial, disc flat or convex, black, 1-5 mm. diameter; receptacle saucer-shaped, sessile on a broad base, smooth, black, margin often undulating. Flesh composed of closely packed hyaline hyphae, 4-5µ wide, with thick, glassy, subgelatinised walls, passing at the margin into a narrow belt of thinwalled parallel hyphae. Excipulum of angular isodiametric cells, those of the inner zone thinwalled, those of the outer layers about 5µ diameter and thick-walled, sheathed towards the base of the receptacle by a zone of very slender hyphae, about 1 µ wide, closely packed in a gelatinous matrix. Asci narrowly cylindric-clavate, 170 x 10-12µ, 8-spored, with massive apical ring stained blue by Melzer's reagent; ascospores uniseriate, sometimes becoming biseriate at the tip of the ascus, elliptic-fusiform, 12-17 x 5 µ hyaline with oily contents, becoming 1-3-septate; paraphyses very slender, abruptly enlarged above into subglobose tips 3-4µ across, not cemented into an epithecium. On dead wood.

There are odd discrepancies in Rodway's two published descriptions of this species. In the original diagnosis the apothecia are black and the spores 'light purple when mature'. In his revised description of 1925 the apothecia are purple and the spores hyaline. The type packet bears a pencil note under the sketch of a spore 'Smooth, coat thick, light purple' followed by the comment in ink 'Subsequent exam. of dry material shows spores appear hyaline or slightly tinted'. The dried material now yields a purplish-brown stain in ammonia and any colour seen in the fresh spores was probably in the sap rather than in the spore wall. Cenangella Sacc. is currently regarded as a synonym of Dermea Fr. but C. tasmanica does not appear to be a typical Dermea. The apothecia would be very large for that genus, they are not obviously erumpent but superficial on very rotten decorticated wood and there is no associated conidial state. The flesh seems to have been rather less gelatinous than in the well known C. sarcoides of Europe, but in all other features the two species are very alike, especially if C. tasmanica was purple when fresh.

On rotting wood of Fuchsia excorticata, 900 m., Dawson Falls, Mt. Egmont, Taranaki, 28.1.1953, Dingley 19043; on unknown host, Black Gully, Tapanui, Otago, 19.4.1957, S. D. & P. J. Brook 19038.

These collections differ from the type in having the ascospores budding small, globose, secondary spores within the ascus, as in C. cylichnium (Tul.) Boud., from which they differ in the shorter ascospores.

Cenangella tasmanica, n.s. Erumpent, cartilaginous, sessile, concavo-convex, smooth, black; asci cylindric, 8 spores in one series ; spores elliptic, subacute, uniseptate. smooth, wall thick, light purple when mature 10-12 x 5 µ, paraphyses filiform, mostly branched above.
On dead wood.