Comparison

 

2 different localities from same county. The bottom one's near Azusa River Wilderness Park's entrance; the top, a short distance beyond the Mount Wilson Trailhead entrance. The Azusa specimen is the same one pictured on a previous post.

I'm running a common-garden experiment to see how much of their phenotype variation is genetic and how much is environmentally induced.

Edit: oh god I think the top one's apical notch has died, looks like it's time to get a new sample. 

Not that it's incapable of making new notches (but when the preexisting one dies the new ones come out on ventral branches, and I can't figure out a 100% objective way to distinguish ventral branches induced by clonal regeneration from ventral branches of a genetically different specimen that happened to have been hiding underneath as a spore or something. Sometimes two overlapping specimens are appressed + affixed to each other so tightly they look like they're part of the same flesh even though they aren't.)