I was due to stay on Lundy for a week in early November 2020 to make the usual autumn survey of the fungi with Mandy and Chris Dee. Alas lockdown three intervened. No survey. Thinking of a way of still being able to look for fungi I realised that it might be possible to persuade some of the Lundy staff to do the collecting for us and send them out by post. Seemingly a rather silly idea given that most freshly gathered fungi, especially the fleshy ones, arrive after the trials of the UK postal system as boxes filled with rather putrid mushroom soup (speaking of past bitter experiences). However it did strike me that collecting and posting the substrates on which the Lundy Fungi grow could be a way around the problem; they could incubated up here in Western Scotland on receipt and the developed crops of fungi identified. Obviously we are not talking of large mushrooms and toadstools here but the myriads of tiny fruit bodies that also occur on the island but are not easy to find without hand lens and microscope. An obvious target was herbivore dung, which is in copious supply on Lundy and its decomposition supports many species of specialist ‘coprophile’ fungi. A number have already been found and the LFS book Lundy Fungi (2018) by myself and David George even has a chapter devoted to them, mostly the larger and obvious species. However many small coprophiles have yet to be recorded.

The idea was to ask a Lundy collaborator to give up some of their spare time to roam the island collecting samples of dung to dispatch by post to me. Perhaps not to everyone’s taste. However I was delighted when Assistant Warden Rosie Ellis kindly volunteered to do it and she looked out for samples on her Lundy walks. In December I received a parcel of dung samples in plastic bags, an early Christmas present from Rosie. Christmas itself was going to intervene so I let the samples completely dry out in my office (a little smelly for a few days), which does no harm to the fungi, and started them off again in February in petri dishes lined with damp tissue paper. Then all I had to do was a daily check under the stereo microscope for the fruit bodies and to keep the dishes moist. Light was important and stimulates these fungi to sporulate. A few were large enough to be seen without aid, small species of Inkcaps, most others were the minute (0.1mm diameter) cups and flasks of the ascomycete fungi and the taller cylindrical ‘pin moulds’ of the mucoraceous fungi. In all cases to identify them I had to pick off examples with a dissecting needle under the stereo microscope and transfer them to a slide to check the structures and spores under the compound microscope. Then began the (sometimes) lengthy process of puzzling out the identity of the fungi using the admirable keys by Ellis and Ellis, and Watling and Richardson to fungi found on dung. A delightful way to pass ‘lockdown’. At least for a mycologist.

By March 19th I had found 30 species of fungi on the dung samples. Of these 22 appear to be new records for Lundy. Rosie had collected dung from Domestic Sheep, Soay Sheep, Sika Deer and the Rabbits (she said it is sadly hard to find any of the latter). All produced a good crop of fungi and as I write are continuing to do so. In fact it is well known that a succession of fruit bodies appear on dung, beginning with the quick growing ‘pin moulds’, followed by the cup fungi, the flask fungi and finally the ‘toadstool’ basidiomycete fungi like inkcaps , so in the weeks to come more species will undoubtedly appear. Most are decomposers of the dung, working alongside the dung invertebrates. Nearly all have strategies for getting their spores off the dung and onto the surrounding herbage where they stick and await the chance of being eaten, beginning a passage through the gut which is also necessary to stimulate spore germination. To do this the fruit bodies often have spore ‘guns’ which often bend towards the morning light before firing , so ensuring that the spore trajectory is at a low angle and thus well away from the ‘zone of repulsion’ which exists for grazing animals around the dung deposit. Some can shoot their spores for over a metre.

The table shows the species found to date on the different dungs and although some are present on all, such as Schizothecium squamulosum, a producer of thousands of minute black warty flasks over the surface of all the samples, others appear more restricted, for example Iodophanus carneus, with masses of minute (0.1-0.2mm dia.) orange pink cups but only on the domestic sheep dung! Some of the records are unusual and could be new not only to Lundy but also to the SW, notably Rhopalomyces magnus an odd ‘pin mould’ fungus which has comparatively few UK records. Currently I am hoping Rosie can supply some more samples, perhaps extending to Goat Dung and perhaps Pony ‘Apples’ and Cow Pats, the latter will obviously have to be small bits not the whole thing! On the other end of the scale, if Rosie can find it it, Pigmy Shrew dung might yield some surprising species!

 █ indicates the relative abundance on the dung samples

I am also hoping to receive samples of feathers and bones from Rosie which can be incubated in petri dishes in the same way. So far we only have one record of these specialist fungi on Lundy but studies by Puffin Post would undoubtedly reveal more.

John Hedger, March 2021