Australasian sequestrate fungi 18: Solioccasus polychromus gen. & sp. nov., a richly colored, tropical to subtropical, hypogeous fungus

Abstract

Solioccasus polychromus gen. & sp. nov., the most brightly colored hypogeous fungus known, is described from Papua New Guinea and tropical northern Australia south into subtropical forests along the Queensland coast and coastal mountains to near Brisbane. Phylogenetic analysis of molecular data places it as a sister genus to Bothia in the Boletineae, a clade of predominantly ectomycorrhizal boletes. Ectomycorrhizal trees, such as members of the Myrtaceae (Eucalyptus, Corymbia, Lophostemon, Melaleuca spp.) and Allocasuarina littoralis, were present usually in mixture or in some cases dominant, so we infer some or all of them to be among the ectomycorrhizal hosts of S. polychromus.

• Basidiomycota
• Boletales
• Boletineae
• Bothia
• DNA
• ectomycorrhizae
• EF1-α
• ITS
• LSU
• rhizomorphs
• tef1

Acknowledgments

We thank the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research for financially supporting projects 8736 and 9116 for N. Malajczuk and Australian Biological Resources Study for its grant to T. Lebel, J. Trappe and R. Halling (Revision of Australian truffle-like genera in the order Boletales, Basidiomycota). U. S. National Science Foundation supported travel by Trappe and Castellano through Grant DEB 9007186. The U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, contributed laboratory and office facilities in support of Trappe’s participation in the research. Roy Halling acknowledges support from National Science Foundation grant DEB 1020421 and National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration grant 8457-08. The Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service provided accommodation and orientation on Fraser Island. Sushma Mandava and Matthew Sewell engineered the extraction and amplification of DNA from the Fraser Island specimen in the laboratory of the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Program for Molecular Systematics at the New York Botanical Garden. We appreciate the excellent service by the staffs of herbaria in providing access to and accessioning of these collections: the Queensland Herbarium, Brisbane (BRI), Papua New Guinea Forest Research Institute Herbarium, Lae (LAE), National Herbarium of Victoria, South Yarra (MEL), New York Botanical Garden, Bronx (NY), Oregon State University Herbarium, Corvallis (OSC), Western Australian Herbarium, Perth (PERTH) and Papua New Guinea Division of Primary Industry Herbarium (PNG). Sam Malish of the Papua New Guinea Forest Research Institute and Brian Gunn of the Australian Commonwealth Institute for Scientific and Industrial Research Division of Forestry and Forest Products efficiently organized and guided the collecting trips in Papua New Guinea, as did Paul Reddell of CSIRO Forestry and Forest Products for tropical Australia. Roy Young, Katawe Baku, M. Bisam, Neale Bougher, Victoria Gordon, K. Querengasser and G. Tubeg, additional participants in the field work, merit our deeply felt thanks for putting up with tropical temperatures and humidity and often living and working in primitive conditions.