Hi Luke & Rupert,
I agree, I have been monitoring this on a number of trees on varying sites.
It appears to be completely compartmentalised until the tree becomes stressed
and then it can appear to extend bark lesions and fruit on bark that has
recently died. I spoke to David Rose about this about ten years ago and, if I
remember correctly, at that time he considered it to mainly a saprotropth
that may be able to act as a weak pathogen.
Re the last par. of Gerrit's post:
An observation re Kretzschmeria - I have seen it behave as a saprotroph on
old basal wounds on beech, in a stable relationship with actively growing
trees over periods of more than a decade; implying that it too may be
triggered into aggressive growth following trauma - root damage/loss,
pruning, wind-rock etc.
And a final question : is Kretzschmaria deusta an exceptional case, because
it starts out from the heart wood as a saprotroph, changes to a parasitic
mode once the mycelium has invaded the cambium and returns to being a
saprotroph once the tree has died ?
I have assessed and documented several hundreds of trees affected by K.
deusta, which in The Netherlands is mainly found on Fagus and Tilia, but also
on nine other deciduous tree species, and the three stage strategy of K.
deusta I described before is the most common in my experience, although I
also have found K. deusta fruiting as a saprotroph from dead heart wood
inside a deep cavity on a beech and fruiting as a primairy parasite from the
cambium while very superficially decomposing sapwood at 2 to 6 metres height
on a beech.
Happy New Year to both of you too,
Gerrit
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