fungus – Page 3

Eau de la viande pourrie

This has to be the coolest mushroom I’ve ever personally encountered (and that includes the one that will colonize peoples’ nasal cavities). I went down the road to the 100-acre woods this afternoon, bundling myself up snugly and pulling out my long johns and winter coat for the first time. I also got to try out a new toque Dan’s mom brought home for me from Scotland, one that extends down the sides of the face in cozy ear flaps. It’s my new favourite toque. Despite the brisk 5 C (41 F) temperature (which will feel balmy in a few months), I was nice and comfortable for the walk. This was important, because if I hadn’t’ve been, I would’ve decided to skip the last loop of the trail. Since I was comfortable, my ears weren’t frozen and my thighs weren’t numb, I figured we might as well hike ’round it and enjoy the last section of forest. And if I hadn’t done that, then I would’ve missed this awesome mushroom.

This is a Netted Stinkhorn, Dictyophora duplicata. Also known as the Skirted Stinkhorn (the name it goes by in the Lone Pine mushroom guide I have) or Veiled Stinkhorn, it takes its name from that lacy fringe that hangs down from the cap. This one happens to be a very modest fringe; in some it can flare out from the stalk like an A-line skirt on a dancer doing pirouettes. Incidentally, that’s a very inappropriately pretty image for this mushroom. It is also sometimes placed in the genus Phallus, a genus of stinkhorns named for their suggestive shape. And it takes the other half of its common name from – you guessed it – its smell.

If you can read French, then you already know what it smells like from the title of this post: rotten meat. The individuals I came across today were only just getting started, but a stinkhorn in full stink is detectable from a considerable distance away. It’s so strong that this website recounts a meeting of the North American Mycological Association where a specimen of a stinkhorn had to be isolated outside, even though all the other fungi were on tables indoors.

The mushroom uses the smell to attract insects that come to carrion, primarily flies. When the flies arrive, they’re drawn to the sticky cap, which is covered in a gooey, sweet (apparently) layer that the insects can feed on. Embedded in this goo are the mushroom’s spores. When the insects land and walk across it, some of the goo and spores get stuck on the insect’s legs or body and carried off. Eventually the insect will probably land and deposit the spores somewhere appropriate for the fungus to grow. The stinkhorn is completely dependent on flies and other insects to transport its spores, since they can’t be carried on the wind as with most mushrooms.

Netted Stinkhorns grow in rich soils in deciduous woodlands. Unlike most fungi, which have a root-like network called a mycelium from which the fruiting body itself sprouts, stinkhorns begin life as an egg. It starts out small (obviously, since the spores are microscopic) and gradually grows in size. When it breaks the surface of the soil it may resemble a small puffball. The difference is that inside a baby fungus is forming; if you slice a stinkhorn egg open, you’ll find a tubular formation that will eventually grow into the full mushroom.

When it’s ready to emerge, the “skin” of the egg splits and a nearly full-grown stinkhorn cap emerges. In the first photo, the egg is the peachy-coloured mass at the base. The stalk is rapidly grown underneath of the cap, pushing it out. The growth of a stinkhorn, from egg to full length, is incredibly fast – a matter of hours, you could almost set up a lawnchair to watch. To save you some time, though, check out this time-lapse video of four stinkhorns emerging and then dying. The full video is over the course of 77 hours (3 days 5 hours), with frames taken at 5 minute intervals. The whole video is 43 seconds. The first stinkhorn to emerge lasts only 24 of those seconds, and takes just 2 seconds to reach full length. Two seconds of video works out to about 3.5 hours.

As the stinkhorn ages, its cap goes from a smooth sphere to slightly wrinkled (see second photo) to very wrinkled. By the time all the goo has been picked off the cap by insects (and what isn’t often liquefies and runs or is washed off), all that’s left is a thin network of white creases. Eventually the skirt deteriorates and the stalk may break and fall over. This was an older one that I actually found last week when I was hiking through there. At the time it was the only one I saw. It had disappeared by today, but three others had grown to take its place. It was a warmer day last week, which probably accounts for the greater number of flies on the dead one than the fresh ones – although, I did notice that it was considerably smellier than any of the three today were.

This species of fly seemed to be the most abundant visitor at the stinkhorns. No, don’t ask me to identify what it is. Someday I’ll learn to at least ID them to family, but I’m not there yet. A few websites suggested that blow flies such as Bluebottles are among the most common visitors. Given the albinistic look of this one, though, I might hazard a guess that it was a Suillia sp., a group whose larvae grow “in carrion, dung, or rotting fungi”, according to the Kaufman guide to insects.

Although the smell would probably put anyone off wanting to try the mature mushroom, apparently the eggs are edible and reasonably tasty. That said, in cultures where such things are often practiced, the mature mushroom, sans cap, is sometimes eaten as an aphrodisiac (which makes sense if you subscribe to the believe that items from nature will cure ailments of those organs which they resemble).

I decided not to try any.

Where the faeries dance

We’ve been having rain, rain, rain, all week. And more forecasted all next week. I think we had about 25 days in August that were rain-free, including an extended stretch of over three weeks. Before, and now also apparently after, that brief window, it’s been rain. I saw a Facebook friend describe it as an extra-long spring, and an early fall, with no real summer. So true.

All this rain has been great for mushrooms, though, among other things. I saw SO many mushrooms while out walking with Raven this afternoon (I made sure to check the radar before grabbing my camera and heading out – I had about an hour before more rain arrived). I took photos of a bunch of them, which may show up in a separate post later this week (I have subjects planned already for Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and hope to actually post all three days, but we’ll see how it goes). But I thought I’d share these photos separately.

I did a big loop about the property this afternoon, sticking to the wooded areas, mostly. I returned to the house by way of a pine plantation at the foot of the property, along the road, that the owners had planted a couple of decades ago as a privacy screen when a couple of houses were built across the road from them (the same spot where I’d found the Pinesap a couple months ago). They are very plantation-y, straight rows, little-to-no understory. But they do their job well – even though the house across the road is only about 150 m (165 yards) from our own, and there’s about 70 m of meadow on that side of our house, we can’t see it. Because the pines are fairly dense, and not much grows there, I’ve only been into them once or twice, shortly after we moved here. Inevitably I come out with my hair full of twigs and needles.

As we pushed through the branches, I was delighted to discover a fairy ring, hidden among the dense trees. I had Raven sit in the middle and pose for a photo. She really wanted to go investigate the rustling in the leaf litter she heard at the other end of the trees, but was a good girl and sat until I released her. (I’m pretty sure whatever had been rustling had disappeared by the time she got there.)

There are as many as 50 or 60 species of mushrooms that will regularly grow in fairy rings, but I’m fairly certain that this one is Gymnopus dryophilus. Its scientific name, dryophilus, means “lover of oaks”, and it is usually referred to by the common name “Oak Collybia” or “Oak-loving Collybia” (Collybia being the genus it used to be assigned to, before the genus was split into three; members of the daughter genera still go by the common names Collybia, though). Despite this, it is actually found associated with a range of tree species besides oak, pine being one of the primary ones. It’s one of the most common of forest mushrooms, found in many habitats, across much of the continent, fruiting for most of the year, and I’ve noticed on a few websites that it’s been (jokingly) given the label “weed mushroom”. It happens to be edible, but apparently it’s fairly tasteless, and the stalk is fibrous – it’s also known by the common name “Russet Toughshank”.

The most common fairy ring mushroom is a species actually called the Fairy Ring Mushroom, or sometimes Scotch Bonnet, Marasmius oreades. It’s most often encountered in the middle of grassy lawns, and is also edible, and (I gather) quite tasty. As I understand it, fairy rings are the result of a colonizing spore spreading out mycelium (mushroom “roots”) and then popping up fruiting bodies at the furthest edge of the mycelium. Because it uses up nutrients from the soil as it grows, the mushrooms only appear at the outside edge, where the nutrient availability is greatest. As the mycelium network gets wider, so does the ring of mushrooms. The strange formation unsurprisingly resulted in quite a bit of superstition; the most commonly known (and the one that gives the rings their common name today) is the Celtic belief that the rings were used by fairies for dancing.

There are two types of fairy rings: free and tethered. Tethered rings are the result of mychorrizal fungi that depend on a host tree for survival (and the host tree also benefits from them). They are usually found around a central tree trunk and never get very large. I think this ring is one of those types, because of the trunk in the centre that Raven is sitting beside, although it could just be coincidence. Free fairy rings aren’t associated with trees and so aren’t restricted in where they grow or how large they get. In theory they can continue growing indefinitely. The biggest known ring, of Clitocybe geotropa and found in France, is about 600 m (655 yards) in diameter, and estimated to be about 700 years old.

Tuesday Miscellany

Another week flies by – has it passed already? It seems all I can do to keep up some days. Here is the other half of last week’s miscellaneous collection, along with a few new additions from this past week.

Our swimming pool was closed up this weekend and drained today. The owners of the house had it going earlier this season, before Dan and I moved in. Neither Dan nor I are avid swimmers, though I do enjoy paddling in warm water. However, the weather was so cool and rainy this summer, the pool never warmed up, and it only got hot enough for me to even consider it on a couple of occasions. Rather than waste the energy in keeping it up, we advised our landlord that it might just be best to drain it.

It will be missed by the frogs, who had discovered this watery oasis in the middle of our pondless meadows. Our peak count was seven individuals. We tried removing them at one point, walking them back half a kilometer to the neighbour’s pond, but within a couple of days new ones had moved in to take their place. Surprisingly, they didn’t seem to suffer from the chlorinated water (very low levels, but still), and they probably loved the bonanza of insects that got caught in the pool and drowned. They would haul themselves up on the hose of the kreepy krawler. Raven had a blast running about the pool edge, peering in at them, she’d go to the pool gate and sit and whine for us to let her in. We mostly seemed to have Green Frogs inhabiting the pool, identified by their green upper lip and dark bands across their back legs.

August was our first “repeat” month in eastern Ontario, since we moved out of Toronto to the lake house for Aug 1 last year. It’s been interesting to see some of the same observations we had last year turning up again this year. One example is this giant crane fly. Almost three inches from foot to foot, it’s got to be the biggest crane fly species I’ve seen. We had a couple around the house last year, including this individual. It’s a Giant Eastern Crane Fly, Pedicia albivitta. They’re attracted to artificial light, and we’ve been seeing them regularly at our porch lights.

This repeat goes back to spring 2008. I found a similar cocoon stuck to my parents’ windowsill last winter, and later saw many at the research station. Since that initial observation, I’ve also seen them on the outside walls of the lake house, and now around here, including on plants in the meadow. They belong to a bagworm moth, probably Psyche casta, a species whose females fashion these stick cases like caddisflies and then never leave them. They mate with males and then lay their eggs all within the confines of their case. Once the female has mated, she secures the case to a surface with a sticky pad of silk, and then dies. The case in this photo probably no longer had a living adult in it, though I didn’t try taking it off to check.

I spotted this strikingly-patterned beetle on a plant at my parents’ new place while housesitting last weekend. It’s a leaf beetle, and I foolishly neglected to pay attention to what species of plant it was on. Since leaf beetles tend to be very closely associated with particular types of plants (such as the Three-lined Potato Beetles or Clavate Tortoise Beetles on my Chinese Lanterns in the spring), knowing the plant species would have helped with identification. Still, I suspect it to be a Ragweed Leaf Beetle, Zygogramma suturalis, which feeds, unsurprisingly, on ragweed, a pretty common plant around here.

I found this brightly-coloured clump of fungi on an old stump in one of our small stands of trees out in the middle of the meadows. From the photos in my mushroom guide I think it’s Mycena leaiana, a fairly common and widespread bright orange fungus that is usually found in clusters on stumps and logs. It’s considerably larger than other Mycena species I’ve encountered, and was particularly eye-catching, even through all the foliage.

I found this lovely flower in the woods at my parents’ place. Of course, after posting the white mystery flowers last week, I knew what these ones were: White Turtlehead, Chelone glabra. It’s a very common, widespread species that enjoys wet soils and is found blooming this time of year. It’s a host plant for Baltimore Checkerspots, which we’ve seen lots of in the wet woods at the back of our meadows where I found that first one.

I noticed under our birdfeeder the other day that some opportunistic seeds had sprouted. Two of them had got quite large. I think the one on the right is a sunflower; I did notice a few other younger sunflowers hidden in the long grass. The one on the left, of course, is corn. This one rather surprised me, I didn’t think that the corn packaged in birdseed mix was actually viable. But apparently so! I don’t expect that it will get large enough to actually produce ears before the frost this year, but I’m impressed by its tenacity nonetheless!

A selection of summer fungi

Fall is the time when the greatest diversity of fungus (mushrooms) is usually seen, with the boldest colours and most interesting, eye-catching shapes. However, summer can be pretty good, too. We’re just starting to see quite a number of speciies appearing in the woods around our research sites, and I’ve been collecting photos for sharing here. There are quite a number of nondescript species in the woods, as well, but these are some of the more interesting ones I’ve come across recently.

The first one is Yellow Nolanea, Nolanea murraii. We found these in the deciduous woods at Rock Ridge as we were hiking out one day. Their yellow colour caught my eye at first, but it was the intriguing peaked conical caps that grabbed my interest. It’s a fairly common and widespread species, also sometimes called Yellow Unicorn Entoloma. Entoloma is an alternative genus – I gather that taxonomy for this group of mushrooms is still being sorted out.

Another yellow one, this is Yellow Waxcap, Hygrocybe flavescens… I think. You’d be surprised at how many bright yellow, small, flat-capped, gilled mushrooms there are. One of the characteristic features of waxcaps are, unsurprisingly, their shiny, waxy caps, and this one certainly has a shiny cap.

Gilled mushrooms such as this one are usually separated by the colour of the spore print they make. A spore print is when you take the cap of the mushroom off the stem and set it on a piece of paper for an hour or two. The spores fall out of the gills and onto the paper, leaving a print. Depending on the species, the print may be pinkish, brownish, or light or dark colours (usually variations on grayish). Yellow Waxcap is in the light-spored group, and has a whiteish spore print. Of course, I don’t really like to pluck the cap off mushrooms I find, particularly if there aren’t very many of them, so I’m content to call the species a “maybe” and leave it at that.

I believe this is another member of the same genus, Conic Waxcap, Hygrocybe conica. The yellowish stems and shiny orange caps seem to match (Conic starts out red, but fades to orange as it ages). The downside of taking photos and trying to ID from them later is that often you don’t know to check for certain features. For instance, Conic Waxcap, when you bruise it, turns black. I didn’t think to try bruising it, so I don’t know if this mushroom would turn black or not.

This one was clearly a bolete. Boletes have solid undersides with many small pores from which they release their spores, rather than the gills of the first three mushrooms. Narrowing down the species of bolete is trickier. I think it’s Orange Bolete, Leccinum aurantiacum. The guide book specifies the spore print to be brownish, but again, I didn’t try doing that. It was the only one in the area that I noticed. The stalk is supposed to have red-brown or black dots, but the photo in the book doesn’t show dots, or at least nothing obvious.

This dainty little species was growing in the path at Rock Ridge on our last visit, having popped up in the week and a half since we were previously there. There are a couple of genera that are characterized by small caps on delicate stalks. One is Mycena, and the other is Marasmius. This one is Marasmius delectans, I think (noticing a pattern with that word?). Most of the species have whiteish caps with darkish stalks. Many are told apart through variations in the shape and size of the cap, and can sometimes be subtle.

This frilly brown fungus, resembling a spruce tree a bit in its structure, caught my eye as I was checking out a family of Field Sparrows foraging under some pine trees at Rock Ridge. I think it’s a species of Thelephora, possibly Thelephora terrestris, Earth Fan. My book suggests it should have a whiteish margin, but there are some photos online that don’t show that.

As I was editing the photo, I noticed that there were little Marasmius mushrooms growing alongside it that I’d completely missed when I was there in person, as caught up with the main fungus as I was. These ones seem to have a brownish centre to their cap and I think they may be M. androsaceus.

And finally, this fungus I discovered when I stepped off the path to photograph a group of Indian Pipe at Maplewood Bog a couple weeks ago. Appropriately, fungi that grow in branching formations like this are called coral fungi. I suspect this one is Golden Coral, Ramaria aurea. One of the notes in the guide is that the species has a thick, short, whitish stalk, which this one has. The fungi shown above all release their spores from either gills or pores on their undersides, but coral fungi are covered with a layer of spore-producing cells that are essentially their skin.

Tuesday Miscellany

An assorted collection of photos this week. Getting out to do the MAPS fieldwork with Dan has been a great opportunity for me to see things I wouldn’t normally encounter; not just birds, but bugs and flowers and such as well. It’s almost too good – I come home at the end of the day with a couple hundred photos, and enough blog fodder to last me a couple of weeks. I’ve been hoarding some photos that I hope to put into a full-length post, and hopefully I actually get around to doing that.

This week’s first photo is of a Scarlet Tanager we banded at one of the MAPS sites over the weekend. He’s fine, don’t worry – some birds, if you open your hand slowly, don’t realize they’re free at first, and will just sit on your open palm for a few moments before flying away. Male Scarlet Tanagers are striking birds, and their red can sometimes be so bright and vibrant as to overwhelm the camera. This was a particularly spiffy bird, an after-second-year, meaning it was hatched in at least 2007 or earlier. Birds in their first summer as a breeding adult (second-year birds) can look a little ratty because their wing feathers, which are the same ones they grew in the nest, wear and fade more than seasoned adults.

It was a toss-up over which photo I wanted to use for my headliner image. This Luna Moth was in such pristine condition, unusual for larger moths. I’ve been getting quite a number of these coming to the trap the last few times I’ve set it out – sometimes up to three or four in a night. Yesterday night we accidentally left the porch light on when we went to bed, and when we arose in the wee hours of this morning, in among the great numbers of smaller moths were two Lunas hanging on to the nearby wall. Most people are probably familiar with this species from a number of sleep-aid commercials and other advertising. However, it is a common moth of the east, flying in early summer at northern latitudes, a wider window farther south as it’s able to raise multiple broods. However, because adults live for only about a week, they may not be regularly encountered. Like with so many characteristics of animals, the purpose of the long, showy tails isn’t definitively known, but is believed to be a form of protection by focusing a predator’s attention away from vital body parts.

This was probably third runner-up for header photo. This is a nest stuffed full of Veery chicks. The nest itself is one from Maplewood Bog that Dan profiled on his Frontenac Birds blog. On our last visit the female was still incubating the eggs. Although only nine days elapsed between our first and second visit, already the chicks – who weren’t even hatched last time – are alert, eyes open, and begging for food as you carefully lift the overhanging branch to peer in. It’s amazing how fast chicks grow. For most songbird species, it only takes two weeks or so for the young to grow from naked, blind hatchling to feathered fledgling, and leave the nest. This nest will be empty on our next visit.

Back over at Hemlock Lake, we spotted a number of these interesting and colourful fungi growing on the trunks of dead hemlocks. The site is full of dead trees, mostly hemlock though possibly some pine – my dead-bark identification skill is still being refined – so there’s certainly lots of great growing location for this fungus. I believe this to be Ganoderma tsugae, also known as Hemlock Varnish Shelf. These are young specimens; as they grow they’ll lose the bold white outer rim, and will attain a slick gloss, the reason for the word “varnish” in the name. The fruiting bodies themselves, the part you actually see, are annual; they grow anew every year. However, the mycelium, the network of “roots” that exist within the dead tree, is longer-lived and is the source of new brackets each year. It’s a species that can be found across a large portion of North America.

I haven’t noticed these around our home, but there were quite a few at Maplewood Bog, and a handful at Hemlock Lake as well. This is Wood Lily, Lilium philadelphicum. It seems to grow at the edge of clearings in dry deciduous woods, and will grow in loose congregations of a handful of individuals scattered together. It’s very widespread, found just about everywhere in North America east of the Rocky Mountains, except for the Maritimes and Florida. It grows from tuberous bulbs, which Native Americans would gather for eating. I imagine, however, that this would need to be done sustainably, as removing the bulb essentially removes the plant.

I haven’t been able to come up with an ID for this fly. One of the rare instances that my trusty Kaufman Insects wasn’t able to provide me with the answer. There are so many species of flies that flipping through my Stephen Marshall’s Insects leaves me a little overwhelmed, though I think it might be a species of Tachinomyia, a relatively common group that develop as parasites of tent caterpillars – something we have no shortage of around here. I thought the yellow foot pads might be useful, but there are a number of species that have those. This poor fly had got caught up in one of our nets. I was able to untangle the fine mesh and let it go, although often with flies and wasps they get it so tightly wound around their tiny necks that you don’t have much choice but to pop their head off to get them out of the net.

And the last photo, a little bit of rainbow hiding in a juniper shrub. The sites are usually very dewy first thing in the morning, and I wear rainpants just till the sun is up high enough to dry off the vegetation. The dew drops make for some beautiful images. In this case, the dew had lightly coated a spider web, and I walked past it, the sunlight refracting through the millions of tiny water droplets cast a lovely rainbow.

That’s it for this week. There’s so much going on, though, I’ve already started working on next week’s miscellany post!