Summary: Lentaria epichnoa produces whitish, branched fruitbodies up to 2.5cm high, arising from a cottony white mycelium. Microscopic characters include elliptic, smooth, pale bluish amyloid spores and clamped hyphae up to 12 microns wide.
Microscopic: spores 5-6.5 x 2.5-4 microns, elliptic, smooth, pale amyloid, white, without droplets; basidia 18-30 x 4-6 microns; hyphae 3-12 microns wide, "inflated, clamped, with slightly thickened (?submucilaginous) walls, long-celled", (Corner(2)), in BC specimen spores 5-6.5 x 3-3.5 microns, pale bluish amyloid, Estonian specimen 1-2(3) droplets in spores, (Corner(3))
Notes: Lentaria epichnoa has been found in BC, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, France, Sweden, and USSR, (Corner(3)).
Habitat and Range
SIMILAR SPECIES
Multiclavula mucida is mostly unbranched. Lentaria pinicola has wider spores. Lentaria byssiseda is a whitish to pinkish-tan species that often grows on wood, few-branched or many-branched, sometimes with green-tinged branch tips, arising from a small or spreading white mycelial patch and often with rhizomorphs: spores measure 10-18 x 3-6 microns, (Corner(2)). L. byssiseda is mentioned by Arora for California, but Corner(3) synonymizes it with L. soluta and expresses doubts about the independence of L. soluta from L. surculus.
Habitat
densely clustered or cespitose [in tufts] on dead coniferous wood, (Corner(2))