Lycogala exiguum Morgan

Song, Wen-Long, Jiang, Zi-Qiong, Li, Min, Leontyev, Dmytro, Gao, Yang & Chen, Shuang-Lin, 2025, Comprehensive revision of Lycogala (Myxomycetes) in subtropical China: morphological and phylogenetic insights and ten new species, IMA Fungus 16, pp. e 147535-e 147535 : e147535-

Lycogala exiguum Morgan , J. Cincinnati Soc. Nat. Hist. 15 (3–4): 134 (1893)

Distribution.

Widely distributed worldwide.

Specimen examined.

CHINA • Hubei Province: Houhe National Nature Reserve , on rotten wood, 26 Jun 2019, collected by Shu-Zhen Yan and Min Li ( HFNNU 11333 ) .

Notes.

Lycogala exiguum is considered a species complex at the current level of knowledge ( Leontyev et al. 2023 b). In the two-gene phylogenetic tree (Fig. 2 ), collections identified as L. exiguum , based on morphological characteristics, formed a large clade represented by at least six putative species. However, it is still uncertain which clade represents the “ true ” L. exiguum , as the DNA data of the type specimen are not available. In this study, we describe two new species ( L. annulatum and L. fasciculovesiculiferum ) from the L. exiguum complex, both of which differ in morphological characteristics from the original ( Morgan 1893) and emended ( Leontyev et al. 2023 b) descriptions of L. exiguum . One more species of the complex, L. “ microcapum ”, will be described in a separate paper.

Figures

Figure 2. Maximum likelihood tree inferred from the concatenated sequences of SSU and COI, showing the phylogenetic relationship of Lycogala. The members of Reticularia were used to root the tree. Only Maximum likelihood ultrafast bootstrap support (UBS) / Bayesian posterior probabilities (PP) ≥ 70 / 0.7 are shown. The voucher numbers are indicated after the species names. The number of identical genotypes is in parentheses (if present). The ten new species described in this study are indicated in red and bold. The four new species to China are indicated in blue and bold. Other newly obtained sequences are in bold. The scale bar represents the number of substitutions per site.