Calymperes tahitense

Detailed description

Plants robust, apparently yellow-green when fresh, terrestrial. Stems 10–35 mm, with moderately conspicuous, brown, smooth rhizoids in lower portions. Leaves loosely contorted when dry, erect-spreading when moist, linear from a slightly broader base, tubulouse, the lamina abruptly tapered at apex to a well-developed proboscis, coarsely toothed at apex by multi-cellular teeth, unistratose except at the thickened margins, 6–7 × 1 mm; cancellinae extending one-fourth to nearly one-third the leaf length, rounded distally, with files of files of hyaline cells extending among the green cells of the upper lamina, with cells rectangular and mostly c.45–75(–90) × 25 µm; leaf margins very strongly thickened and winged (in cross-section) throughout, with well-developed teniolae (intra-marginal border) extending one-third or more the leaf; upper laminal cells ± isodiametric, somewhat irregular, dark green, mostly 3–5 µm in great diam., appearing smooth in surface view, in cross-section bulging on adaxial surface. Costa stout, mostly short excurrent (nearly filling the proboscis and usually extending slightly beyond the “lamina” of the proboscis), not tapered and somewhat swollen at apex, bearing clusters of propagulae only on the adaxial apical surface, in cross-section protruding strongly and rounded abaxially, with median guide cells and two stereid bands. Propagulae not forming spherical clusters, the individual morphology not clearly seen in N.Z. material