Cis bilamellatus (Wood, 1884)

This is our only non-native member of the family, it was described from specimens found at West Wickham (south of London) in 1884 and over the next few decades it became common and spread slowly over the surrounding area but it was not until 1934 that the species started to become widespread and generally common, and there are records from Woking (1935), Oxon (1936), Nottinghamshire (138), Cheshire (1940), Cambridge (1949) and Hampshire (1950). In 1910 C.G. Champion discovered that it was synonymous with the widespread Australian C. munitus Blackburn, 1888, and it is now supposed that the species was imported from Australia either with timber or with herbarium specimens destined for Kew Gardens. The modern distribution includes all of England and Wales, Anglesey, Man and the Isle of Wight, and there are records from southern Scotland and Ireland, it was discovered on the channel Islands in 1999 and since that time it has occurred in northwest France on several occasions, this represents the European extent of the distribution but this is very likely to change in the future. Through much of England and Wales it is now our most common ciid and this success has been attributed to its ability to use a range of fungal hosts, often alongside other ciids and fungivorous beetles, among known hosts are Laetiporus sulphureus (Bull.) Murrill (1920), Pleurotus sapidus Quélet, 1883, Cerioporus squamosus (Huds.) Quélet (1886), Fomitopsis betulina (Bull.) Cui, Han & Dai (2016), Inonotus dryadeus (Pers. : Fr.) Murr., Polyporus adustus (Willd.) Fr., Ganoderma applanatum (Pers.) Pat., Irpex Fr. sp., G. resinaceum Boud., Trametes versicolor (L.) Lloyd (1920) and T. hirsuta (Wulfen) Lioyd (1924) but adults are likely to occur on other species, they may also occasionally occur under bark or among samples of decaying wood with no obvious fungal associations, and they very occasionally visit flowers of lime and possibly other trees. All life stages have been recorded throughout the year and the species seems to be continuously breeding throughout its range; adults generally occur in small numbers during the winter and increase in abundance in the spring when hundreds, along with numerous larvae and pupae, may occur in a single sporophore, they will continue breeding until the fungus is reduced to an empty shell, sometimes remaining over several seasons, and in the meantime disperse to other sporophores. Populations will breed and are easy to keep indoors in containers, they will produce adults year-round and these tend to emerge synchronously and will readily infest most fungus samples offered to them although they should be kept protected as parasites will otherwise soon appear. Sampling from the wild is simply a matter or tapping sporophores over a net but adults sometimes fall out in large numbers, especially at night when they are active on the surface, and so will need to be released safely, they are generally common in woodland and wooded parkland but will occur on a wide range of deciduous trees wherever suitable hosts are fruiting e.g. beside busy roads, pathways and in gardens.