The Investigation and Diagnostic Centre of the Plant Health and Environment Laboratory of the former Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (now Ministry for Primary Industries) did a molecular analysis on DNA extracted from ascomata of this fungus but found no match with any of the registered sequences. A search of the literature and use of various keys led us to the revised family Acrospermataceae (Minter et al. 2007) and the genus Acrospermum. A search in Index Fungorum yielded the names of 66 species and subspecies in Acrospermum. We then began to examine the protologues of each of these names. That for Acrospermum gaubae, described by Petrak (1955) from Banksia ericifolia from Pigeon House Mountain in the Budawang Range, New South Wales, Australia, matched our collections well, except that the New Zealand specimens are larger. A comparison is given in Table 1.

This is the first record of A. gaubae in New Zealand; indeed, apart from the initial report of Petrak (1955), it appears to be the only other record of the fungus in the literature. Acrospermum gaubae is purely superficial and causes no damage to its hosts.