Malmidea is a genus of crustose lichens and the type genus of the family Malmideaceae. It was established in 2011 to contain a phylogenetically distinct group of species formerly placed in the genus Malcolmiella. The crust-like thallus of Malmidea lichens has a surface that varies from smooth to rough, featuring textures such as (wart-like), (grainy), or (pimpled). These textures are often formed by , which are spherical clusters of green algal cells from the family Chlorococcaceae, encased in fungal hyphae. Malmidea comprises nearly 70 mostly tropical species that grow on bark, although a few
GENUS
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Malmidea is a genus of crustose lichens and the type genus of the family Malmideaceae. It was established in 2011 to contain a phylogenetically distinct group of species formerly placed in the genus Malcolmiella. The crust-like thallus of Malmidea lichens has a surface that varies from smooth to rough, featuring textures such as (wart-like), (grainy), or (pimpled). These textures are often formed by , which are spherical clusters of green algal cells from the family Chlorococcaceae, encased in fungal hyphae. Malmidea comprises nearly 70 mostly tropical species that grow on bark, although a few grow on leaves.
==Taxonomy== Both the family Malmideaceae and the genus Malmidea were created in 2011 to accommodate a group of species, formerly placed in genus Malcolmiella (family Ectolechiaceae), that molecular phylogenetics showed to be a distinct lineage and worthy of recognition at the family level. Klaus Kalb, Eimy Rivas Plata, and H. Thorsten Lumbsch originally placed 37 species in the genus – 5 new species and 32 new combinations. Many additional species have since been transferred to Malmidea from other genera, or described as new.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).