​When we wander around the bush admiring the wildlife and wildflowers we walk over an ancient, complex, and fascinating ecosystem of  algae, lichens, bryophytes, and fungi.
It is thought that land plants and fungi spread to land via freshwater ponds. First were simple algae, which would have produced mats of dead material, which became food for the first fungi about 450 million years ago. About this time south-west Western Australia was a part of Gondwana, which was above sea level and close to the equator. I am tempted to think that these great events occurred near present-day Narrogin. Well, several kilometres above Narrogin, as the land surface has eroded down that much since then.

​Around this time bryophytes (mosses, liverworts and hornwarts) also appeared. Bryophyte sexual reproduction can only occur in the presence of water, but they survive and produce clones in dry conditions.

I spent hours wandering around on hands and knees inspecting moss and liverworts. They are very common once one gets down to their level, and they look deceptively like higher plants. No way!  Unlike true plants, bryophytes lack true roots and stems. They directly absorb nutrients and water into their ‘leaves’ and have very different life cycles.

Consider first the life cycle of a higher plant.
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Adult plants have two sets of genes in each cell (diploid). Most plants have a male gene and a female gene (monoecious plants, hermaphrodites) with flowers that have male (anthers with pollen) and female (ovary with egg) parts. Gymnosperms have male and female flowers on a single plant.  Dioecious plants have male and female plants, each with have two male or two female genes and develop male or female flowers. In the short-lived flower phase, cells in anthers and ovary split to form pollen and eggs that have only one set of chromosomes (haploid cells/gametes), which are brought together to fuse and develop into diploid seeds.

In the bryophyte life cycle, resistant haploid spores become long-lived plants (gametophytes), which have only one set of chromosomes. The plants produce sperm and egg receptacles. When conditions are wet enough, male sperm swims over to fertilise eggs on other (dioecious) plants or parts of the same (monoecious) plant.
​Unlike higher plants, the (double-gene) fertilised egg grows into a very short-lived 'plant' (a sporophyte) inside the egg receptacle of the parent gametophyte, which  continues to nourish it. The sporophyte usually grows a narrow stem ending with a fruiting body called a sporophore. Inside the sporophore, double chromosome cells split into single chromosome gametes, which form wind-dispersed spores.
The spores can resist drying, which enables mosses and liverworts to colonise seasonally dry and freshly disturbed soil.

Liverworts come in more shapes than the 'typical' flat liver shaped gametophyte above, and can easily be mistaken for moss.
Some distinguishing features include

• They contain oil glands in their tissue.
• Gametophytes can be elongated or crinkled, but the sections have linear growth. Moss generally have spiral growing points.
• Liverwort sporophytes have shorter, clear to black stalks and glandular spore capsules. Moss have longer green stalks and container-like spore capsules, which often have a noticeable lid and/or spike.
• At Narrogin, liverworts tend to be in wetter spots, whereas moss is more generally common.

 
​The bryophyte gamete phase is very hardy. I often see clumps of moss clones in the driest parts of the landscape such as gravelly rises and breakaways.  Clumps completely dry out over summer. After rain they rapidly rehydrate  and produce more clones within the clumps. 
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The image shows a gametophyte clump with spore-bearing sporophytes, and clone fragments that have broken away to be carried away by runoff to establish downslope. Most dry area clumps with sporophytes are hermaphrodites. These produce both spore and egg receptacles on the same plants, so less rain is needed to splash sperm on to the eggs, than in separate male and female gametophytes. 

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​I wish I could take a time machine back to see ancient forests.
Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by giant mushrooms 8 meters tall and one meter wide, over a knee-high understorey of bryophytes, other fungi and lichens. These Prototaxites fossils have been dug up in Saudi Arabia.

​Greetings fellow Foxies,
Being a volunteer has its challenges, but sometimes there is great pleasure and achievement.
I had one of these moments today in the marri picnic area in the form of a primrose spider orchid, which has volunteered in one of the most degraded areas when the Friends of Foxes Lair was formed (1999). Two donkey orchids and a brown-banded greenhood orchid have also popped up.In recent years I have planted mallees and shrubs and look forward to them prospering. Stink bugs killing seedling growing points is an ongoing problem, which I am managing by using flyscreen covers.

In 2003 the marri picnic area was a bogan's paradise. A crowd gathered in the centre with booze and bonfire while cars took turns doing burnouts around them. Vandalism and rubbish were rife and the concrete picnic table shown in image 1 was destroyed by sledge hammer.  Trees were chopped down for firewood. The yellow arrow marks the same tree to use as a reference point when comparing images.

In 2004 a laterite boulder and telephone pole barrier was created to stop vandalism and keep vehicles out of newly established walk trails that lead from this point. Alas, the telephone poles were dragged out to make a fine bonfire. The insecticide drenched logs may have shortened a few lifespans.

In 2005 more laterite boulders were brought in to replace telephone poles. This was a turning point for the picnic area. apart from a few minor vehicle incursions there was no more vandalism. Bogans don't like walking much.

By 2011 a Lotterywest grant funded a new picnic table and an information bay

By 2019 Narrogin shire a covered and uncovered picnic table

During this time the walking trails were being continuously upgraded and marked. Hopefully there will be more grants to instal interpretive panels along walk trails and to mark out the dual-use cycle trails.
By 2024 I hope to be still around to post an image showing healthy flowering mallees and shrubs here.

Greetings fellow Foxies,
Recently I had an amazing experience when exploring North Yilliminning nature reserve. This year there are thousands of cowslip orchids flowering and I discovered fifty cowslip/little pink fairy orchid hybrids (Caladenia flava subsp flava x Caladenia reptans subsp reptans). The reserve is a hybrid hotspot, which occurs when a lot of one parent flowers (cowslip orchid)  are intermixed with a few of the other parent (little pink fairy orchid). In contrast, Foxes Lair has only two hybrids and I have found a couple of others in my wanderings in other reserves. Exceptional rainfall has spurred a mass flowering that revealed the many hybrids.
I arranged 47 images in order of change from pink to yellow, and noticed that every plant was different, often in subtle ways.  Differences included flower colour and intensity, colour pattern such as stripes, dots and on tips, and intermixing of column and labellum features from each species . It is a great visual illustration of the complex mixing of genes in offspring of two parents.

Click this link and see if you can spot how each of the forty seven hybrids  differ from each other.

Images below show how much the hybrids vary.

​Last July I was excited to find my first false truffle (a Rossbeevera species) at Candy Block, which resembled a small half-submerged, blue-tinted potato. False truffles (also known as false puffballs) differ from true truffles in being basidiomycetes rather than ascomycetes.
The smell of the false truffle after cutting was legendary. Think Eau de Dead Roo with a hint of turpentine! This type of fungi sits below soil level, or sometimes at soil level buried under leaf litter. They don’t have a cap that opens up to release spores, but instead, the spores are formed inside the body of the fungus. False truffles resemble puffballs which don’t release their spores. They rely on birds and animals to eat them, the spores passing through the animal’s digestive tract and deposited in their scats.
The woylie has a largely fungivorous diet and will dig for a wide variety of their fruiting bodies.  Although it may eat tubers, seeds, insects the bulk of its nutrients are derived from underground fungi, which it digs out with its strong fore-claws. The fungi can only be digested indirectly. They are consumed by bacteria in a portion of its stomach. The bacteria produce the nutrients that are digested in the rest of the animal's stomach and small intestine. Before white settlement woylies were abundant so there are lots of false truffles around. We neither see nor smell them because they are usually just beneath the ground or leaf litter

A few weeks later I discovered lots of little yellow Rhizopogon species false truffles on the ground adjoining pine trees in the arboretum. Nearly all false truffle species are mycorrhizal fungi, and Rhizopogon was deliberately introduced into pine plantations with slippery Jacks (Suillus luteus) to improve tree growth. These also resembled tiny yellow potatoes, which eventually collapsed into an unbelievably horrible smelling mush (due to them getting wet through borer holes).

​Early fungi classification was very logical with above-ground capped fungi such as agarics and boletes being in a different group to puffballs, earthballs and false truffles. Alas DNA analysis reveals  more complicated relationships with puffballs and earthballs and false truffles spread across groups. One would think that there is a big difference between  capped and ball type fungi, but one overseas agaric rarely fails to open due to a single recessive gene. I can imagine a gradation in the images below.

The very simplified chart below shows that puffballs, earthballs and false truffles have evolved from/with a range of cap fungi. 
Further reading