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NEYEDC improve and inform environmental decision making, conservation, land management and sustainable development in North and East Yorkshire through the collation, management, analysis and dissemination of biodiversity information.

The Natural History of Yorkshire in 100 Species

Explore the rich and diverse natural history of our region through the stories of 100 species, told by the people who know them best.

#37 Microbotryum parlatorei by Sam Buckton

Meet Sam Buckton, cecidologist and pan-species naturalist!

Sam Buckton is currently Plant Gall Recorder for the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union and Vice-Chair of the British Plant Gall Society – one of the youngest people to have ever taken these roles. Although cecidology (the study of plant galls) is one of his principal loves, he is a pan-species lister with a wide taxonomic interest. He moved to York from Hertfordshire in 2019 to complete Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s Tomorrow’s Natural Leaders programme and stayed in the city to study an MSc in Environmental Economics and Environmental Management at the University of York. He has since been a Research Assistant and currently a PhD researcher with the University’s FixOurFood programme, a project investigating how Yorkshire could transform towards a regenerative food system. He is also a Research Associate with Global Assessment for a New Economics, which aims to synthesise the economic thinking challenging neoliberalism. It is largely because of his love for the natural world that Sam has dedicated his career to encouraging deep societal transformations towards sustainability and justice. In the past, Sam has also worked for various conservation NGOs, co-produced the University of Cambridge’s Biodiversity Action Plan and designed the Cambridge Biodiversity Metric. He currently does most of his species recording at St Nicholas Fields, a small but remarkably species-rich nature reserve in the heart of York. You can contact Sam at sjb312@cantab.ac.uk and follow him on Twitter at @SamJBuckton.

Sam’s chosen species is the elusive dock smut fungus Microbotryum parlatorei which creates distinctive galls on docks, and has recently been refound in Yorkshire – a possible stronghold for this exceptionally rare species in Britain and Europe more widely – after a gap of more than fifty years.

Sam is a fan of celebrating and raising awareness of relatively under-appreciated taxonomic groups. These include the huge diversity of microfungi that attack living plants, many of which are highly host-specific and engage in a specialised evolutionary ‘arms race’ of chemical warfare with their hosts. Although many species are ubiquitous, they are severely under-recorded. However, the smut fungus Microbotryum parlatorei appears to be a genuinely rare species in Britain and Europe as a whole. It creates galls in the stem and ovaries of docks (including Clustered Dock Rumex conglomeratus, Curled Dock R. crispus, Broad-leaved Dock R. obtusifolius and Wood Dock R. sanguineus), which appear swollen and burst when mature to release a purplish-brown powdery mass of spores.

Microbotryum parlatorei © Sam Buckton / Chris Yeates

Yorkshire has historically been a hotspot for recording this species, even though it appears to be vanishingly rare elsewhere in Britain and considered ‘very rare’ by Kálmán Vánky in his 1994 tome European smut fungi. The late W. G. Bramley, who wrote the Fungus Flora of Yorkshire 1985, made half a dozen Yorkshire records of the smut between 1936 and 1957. Thereafter it seems to have remained unrecorded in Britain until Robert Maidstone spotted it in Wacton, Norfolk in 2003 on Wood Dock. But it was finally re-recorded in Yorkshire in 2022 on 26 June, when Sam was walking along the bank of Tang Hall Beck at St Nicholas Fields (colloquially known as ‘St Nicks’), a small and unassuming 10-ha urban nature reserve in the heart of York. He noticed a patch of Wood Dock along the bank with swollen, reddened and ‘zigzaggy’ stems; sure enough, opening up the galls revealed the brown spores of M. parlatorei. Yorkshire’s Fungi Recorder Chris Yeates has since made a beautiful montage of images showing the host, galls and reticulated (netted-looking) spores (see above). There is a relatively cool and damp microclimate along the Beck, which might be one of the reasons why this elusive smut decided to take up residence here. St Nicks can now claim to be a site of national, if not European, importance for this smut. Nonetheless, we can all keep an eye out for it – perhaps we’ve been overlooking it in some areas, as is easy to do with many of the parasites on living plants, and on docks especially, those most commonplace of weeds that we pass by all the time without a second thought. There are other species of Microbotryum to look out for too on other plants – many of them attack the anthers of flowers (e.g. of campions Silene spp.), making them produce dark powdery smut spores in place of pollen.

Recording and monitoring

Records of fungi in Yorkshire, including M. parlatorei, should be sent to Chris Yeates of the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union: csvy.myco@btinternet.com. Chris may also pick up records from iRecord. Sam currently verifies Yorkshire records of gall-causers in the families Cynipidae (gall wasps), Cecidomyiidae (gall midges), Eriophyidae and Phytoptidae (gall mites) on iRecord. He would nonetheless be very interested to hear about any other records of M. parlatorei in Yorkshire.

Further information and acknowledgements

NEYEDC would like to thank Sam for his time and expertise in helping to create this blog.

NEYEDC