English: A lichen - Cladonia uncialis subsp. biuncialis. This species was photographed as part of a quick examination of the mat-forming species of Cladonia in a small area of moorland; see the main item: 1060979.

This is a spiky-looking species; the stems (podetia) are hollow, and rather thin-walled. "When dry it is very brittle and easily breaks up into small tubes looking like pieces of macaroni" [Frank S. Dobson, "Lichens - An Illustrated Guide to the British and Irish Species"] (I found this to be true after I'd taken some small fragments home for testing). As for its habitat, the same work notes that this species is "common on open, acid heathlands, especially peat bogs, even in waterlogged areas".

This area of moorland is indeed an acid heathland habitat, characterised by bogs, and by such plant life as heather (cross-leaved heath and ling), common cotton-grass, bog asphodel, and round-leaved sundew; heath-spotted orchids are present in abundance during the summer months.

The immediate area where these lichens were found was fairly waterlogged; I had to step over and around small pools to get at some of them.

As for the specimens of Cladonia uncialis occurring in this area, they are larger, with much wider stems, than other mat-forming Cladonia species found nearby. Many patches (though not the one in this photograph) seemed to have been grazed, although it is possible that their stems had simply been broken off while dry and brittle (see above). The photograph shows another characteristic of the species, its open axils; in other words, in places where the stem divides into branches, there is often a hole in the angle between the branches. [Some works describe this subspecies as "strictly dichotomous" (meaning that it always divides into two branches at each division); however, it is more or less dichotomous, but is not strictly so.]