Botryolepraria is a genus of byssoid (cottony) lichens of uncertain familial placement in the order Verrucariales. It has two species. The thallus is an uncorticated, three-dimensional network of free fungal hyphae that holds clusters of green algal cells suspended within the lattice, so under low magnification it can resemble a pale, granular Lepraria-like crust. Reports are mostly from shady, humid, protected microhabitats on sheltered rock (often limestone) or on tree bark, including cave entrances and damp woodland or swamp habitats.
Botryolepraria is a genus of byssoid (cottony) lichens of uncertain familial placement in the order Verrucariales. It has two species. The thallus is an uncorticated, three-dimensional network of free fungal hyphae that holds clusters of green algal cells suspended within the lattice, so under low magnification it can resemble a pale, granular Lepraria-like crust. Reports are mostly from shady, humid, protected microhabitats on sheltered rock (often limestone) or on tree bark, including cave entrances and damp woodland or swamp habitats.
==Taxonomy== The genus was circumscribed by Antonio Canals, Mariona Hernández-Mariné, Antonio Gómez-Bolea, and Xavier Llimona in 1997, as a segregate of genus Lepraria, with the widespread and common lichen B. lesdainii as the type, and at that time, only species. The type specimen was collected by French lichenologist Maurice Bouly de Lesdain from a wall in Les Baraques (Calais, France). The genus name combines the Greek-derived botryon ("cluster of berries", referring to the microscopic shrub-like clusters of fungal hyphae and spherical algal cells) with its namesake genus, Lepraria.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).