fungus – Page 4

Monday Miscellany

It’s amazing just how fast the trees leaf out once they start. Just two weeks ago I was noting the late afternoon sun glowing through the sprinkling of leaves on the saplings across the road from the house. Now, I can barely make out the neighbour’s house, which was so apparent in winter. By June, I won’t be able to see it at all. All manner of plant life has greened up or is hard at work at it. Some shrubs are completely leafed out, while the tall ash trees are only just starting. Like the creeks that start tumbling over their rocky beds at spring melt, once spring arrived, time seems to have picked up speed and is rushing by.

We’ve had a fair bit of rain over the course of the last week. It seems to have gotten all the wet out of its system now, however, and we’re forecasted to have mostly clear skies the rest of the week (whether it remains that way remains to be seen). Although all that rain was undoubtedly part of the reason behind the green explosion, the animals were less than happy about it. This Blue Jay, for instance, was looking a bit bedraggled as it visited the feeders one afternoon.

The rain has made the ground near our dock rather soggy. As Dan was flipping his boat over one day last week to try to locate a leak that had gotten worse over the winter, he disturbed this guy from the pool of water around the boat. I spent a lot of time debating the identity of this guy. The bright green upper lip and speckled underbelly should make it easy to ID, I figured. I think that it’s a Mink Frog, Rana septentrionalis, but it could also be a Green Frog, Rana clamitans. I couldn’t figure out a definitive ID characteristic that would rule one out based on the photos I have. A Mink Frog would be a “lifer” for me, a species that I’d never encountered previously. In Ontario they tend to be found further north than the GTA where I grew up, but we’d be at the southern edge of their range, here. They’ve been recorded over in the Park. I’m leaning toward Mink because of the small eardrums, dorsal ridges that terminate halfway down the back, and lack of strong barring on the back legs, but I get the impression these are all somewhat variable features.

Before Dan flipped over his boat, he bailed out some of the water. And sitting in the water was this guy. I believe it’s a water bug in the genus Belostoma. It was rather large, about an inch long, and quite active within the container Dan had scooped it into. This group of water bugs are among those where the female lays her eggs on the male’s back in the spring. He “broods” the eggs, keeping them clean of fungus, protecting them from predators, and making sure they’re well oxygenated (by doing “push-ups” at the surface of the water). I’m not sure if the lack of eggs on this one means it’s a female, or just a male that hasn’t been laid on yet. I did notice, however, in examining the photos on my computer, that it’s sporting a bunch of red mites.

I found this strange beetle clinging to a piece of driftwood beside my moth trap one morning. I wasn’t sure if it was alive, as it fell off the wood when I touched it, and sat with its legs curled under it. I set it on a shelf in a vial for a couple of hours as I sorted through my trap and photographed the moths I’d caught. When I returned to it, it was sitting in a different spot in the vial, and its legs appeared to be out. As soon as I picked up the vial again, however, it fell over and its legs curled underneath it again.

I pulled out my trusty Kaufman Guide to Insects (I love that book, have I mentioned that?), and there it was at the bottom of page 193: Bolitotherus cornutus. Looking it up on BugGuide.net reveals its common name to be Forked Fungus Beetle, or sometimes Horned Darkling Beetle. The two horns are projections from its thorax, and are used in “battle” with other males to win females (I’m not sure the purpose of the orange “hairs”). They are associated with bracket fungi of hardwoods such as maple and beech. The Kaufman guide makes a note that they are adept at “playing dead”, so I guess that’s what my beetle was doing whenever I disturbed it. Was pretty convincing!

While out with Raven today I encountered this bracket fungus projecting from the side of a stump. Just recently I had read over at Huckleberry Days about Dryad’s Saddle, Polyporus squamosus, a stalked bracket fungus that appears about now, so I thought, “Aha! A Dryad’s Saddle!”. I took a documenting photo and returned home. I pulled out my mushroom guide just to confirm and look up a couple of life history details about the species, and now I’m not convinced that it’s Dryad’s Saddle after all. All the photos I can find on the web for the species show it being concave where it attaches to the stalk, rather than convex like my fungus. I searched through the guide a couple of times and poked about the ‘net, but couldn’t come up with an identity.

Very close to the same spot, I stood and watched this bee fly hovering at several Spring Beauties at the side of the road. It was much oranger than previous individuals I’ve seen, and I wondered if it was just a dark Bombylius major, the species I’ve seen before, or a different species. I gather the half-light/half-dark wing markings are fairly distinctive, and seem to only be shared by B. major and B. mexicanus. It’s hard to make out the specific pattern of dark, but I’m leaning toward B. major.

I have no idea what this spider is. Not being insects, they’re not usually treated in much depth in the usual insect guides, although Stephen Marshall’s Insects doesn’t do too badly. It looks like it might be a type of crab spider, but I’m not sure. I’d knocked it off the branch of a tree onto a white sheet when I was out looking for beetles (as per a post by Ted of Beetles in the Bush that suggested if you go around thwacking some branches in the spring, it’s possible to discover some beetles you might not normally encounter). I’ve only gone out the once and thwacked half a dozen branches before I was disrupted by the arrival of a real estate agent who was coming to take photos of the house, and then it rained much of last week. Now that the weather is nice again I plan to give it another try.

A few animals from a little closer to home… with the nicer spring weather the cats have been allowed to go outside in their harnesses to sit in the long grass, enjoy the sunshine, and watch the birds. They’re tied to the deck with short 10-foot leads, so they’re not really a threat to anything except perhaps the odd bug. Both for the safety of wildlife and the cats themselves, I never let my cats roam about outdoors, so this is about as outdoor-cat as these guys will get. They enjoy it, though. Despite the chipmunk who thumbs its nose at them by foraging on fallen seeds under the birdfeeder five feet away.

Fish eats cat. Fish spits up cat.

Since late winter, when the snow was just starting to melt, Raven has been taking an increased interest in water. At the first start of ice breakup, she’d paddle her feet in the shallows of the lake, but it’s taken her a while of gradually working up to letting her feet leave the security of the ground. Even when she started doing that, she’d only push forward half a body length, and then quickly turn around to paddle back. After once or twice of that, she wouldn’t go after sticks that were further out anymore, she’d just look at you and whine. We’d taken her out in the boat a couple times and “thrown” her overboard, and she’d paddle back to shore just fine, but was reluctant to go in of her own accord.

Then, a couple days ago, it was like she had an epiphany. We’d thrown a couple of sticks for her just out of reach from where her feet could touch bottom, and she’d pushed off to grab them, but turn quickly back around. She showed a bit of willingness to go a bit further, and so we got her to do two body lengths, and then three. Then Dan suggested throwing the stick way out and seeing if she’d go for it. So I tossed it four or five meters out, and she struck right out to retrieve it.

Within the course of five minutes, she was suddenly paddling all over the place like a bonafide water dog. Not only that, but once she realized she wasn’t going to drown if her feet left the bottom, she discovered that hey – I actually like this! Now when we take her down to throw sticks for her, she’ll jump right in the water and start paddling out before you’ve even tossed the stick out. Quite a change from the puppy who was reluctant to even get her feet wet last fall!

Today not at Kingsford – British Soldiers

It seems I often find myself at my computer late at night, just starting to compose a blog post long after a reasonable person would have gone to bed. Part of this is due to not having to be up at a set time in the morning (for instance, to go in to the office), so I don’t feel the pressure to keep to a strict schedule in the evenings. The other part of it is that some cosmic process conspires to prevent me from starting any earlier. I went back up to Ottawa to take my sister to sign the paperwork for that car, and through one thing and another ended up leaving the city later than intended. And on the way home, it started snowing. Hard. Such that I was reduced to half the speed I would ordinarily drive on a clear night (it didn’t seem to phaze the locals, however, who breezed by me in their sporty Mazdas and hefty F150s. Part of me hoped they’d get home safely, but the other part of me hoped for the gratification of seeing their taillights in the ditch a few miles up the road). When I got home the one show I watch every week was just starting, and then my Mom called not too long after that. And, well, time just slowly slips away. So all that is a very long-winded way of saying that I had planned a longer post for today, but will delay it in favour of a shorter Today post (would you believe that my university professors criticized me of being too succinct in my term papers?).

Today’s subject is British Soldier lichen, Cladonia cristatella. My sister spotted this patch growing on a stump to the side of the trail. A week or two ago I wrote about Pixie Cup lichen that I found while hiking with Dan and Raven in Frontenac Provincial Park. While looking up the ID for the Pixie Cups, I ran across a few mentions of British Soldier lichen, a member of the same genus as and therefore closely related to the Pixie Cups. It has very distinctive bright red caps, thought to resemble the caps of the British soldiers during the American Revolutionary War in the late 1700s. It’s a relatively common lichen, so it’s somewhat funny that I hadn’t run across it before, especially since you would think the bright red caps would draw one’s attention. However, at least I already knew what they were when we found this patch.

Because lichen are a symbiosis of a fungus and an alga, the red caps are actually the fungus’ fruiting structure. The structure is similar to those employed morels and some other mushrooms, although they aren’t related. It takes a lichen anywhere from 4-8 years to reach sexual maturity and begin to reproduce, so up to that point the British Soldiers would remain capless. While the ones down here may not grow quite so old, lichens growing in the tundra of the far north can reach incredible ages, some anywhere from 1000 to 4500 years. They can survive this long because they are drought-resistant (the tundra is technically a desert, after all) and very hardy. Consider that the oldest of these may have started growing back when the Great Pyramids of Egypt were being constructed, and that really puts that 4500 in perspective. Generally, though, the lichens that grow in our temperate part of the world tend to have the same sort of lifespans as the trees in the forests.

Braving the cold

It was another busy day today, a follow-up to yesterday’s car-shopping. I took my sister back up to Ottawa so she could pick up the plates from her decommissioned car, and then dropped her off at her house before returning back to my parents’. The outing ate up most of the afternoon, and by the time I got back again it was already dark. However, I did take Raven for a hike before we left in the morning, so that hopefully she’d be tired enough for the afternoon she’d just spend it sleeping. My sister joined me, and the three of us hiked along the trails that circle the perimeter of the property. We walked back as far as the pond where I saw the Canada Geese last time I was here, now completely frozen in. The sub-freezing temperatures have persisted long enough that even the river is nearly completely frozen over now.

There are also a few trails that cut through the middle of their woods, but we didn’t have time for everything. Not to mention that it hadn’t warmed up significantly since yesterday, and so we didn’t want to spend an extended period outdoors. Yesterday when we were out hiking about, I noticed Raven was shivering. I can’t say I blamed her, since I was wearing my thick down jacket and was still on the verge of shivering myself, wishing I owned a balaclava, or at least had remembered to bring a scarf with me. She’s got a thin coat for a dog (at least the dogs I’ve known), seeming to have the unfortunate combination of thin, soft border collie texture with the shortness of the lab. Unfortunate for our Canadian winters, anyway – I do like how soft she is to touch, though. There was a time that I would probably have rolled my eyes at a dog owner who bought their dog an overcoat, but now I’m one of the ranks. Raven seemed not the least bothered by it, romping about like usual, and I think it kept her warmer. She certainly looked cute.

We saw a few interesting things while out. Everything is frozen now, there’s hardly a drop of water left liquid, and what there is is all running in the riverbed. The vernal pools of the forest are full, and frozen. I’m not sure just what process creates these air-bubble patterns in the ice, but they were several layers down. You see this a lot in shallow puddles and such, where there’s a pocket of air under the ice. The little bit of searching I did suggests it may be the result of a warm or sunny day melting the top of the layer of ice or snow, and causing cracks in the rest, then a rapid freezing seals over the top of the surface again; the water that’s trapped between ice layers then seeps through the cracks in the lower layer (liquid water is heavier than ice), leaving an air pocket. But don’t quote me on that. My sister felt the pattern looked like a face, maybe sort of like The Scream if it had been painted by Dali.

Speaking of weird ice formations, there were a lot of these along the trails. It was really hard to get a photo that I felt adequately captured the shapes, and in the end I still don’t think I really got it. They looked like ice-covered grass stems, except there was no grass inside. They seemed to be solid ice, but thin and often curved like grass stems. Strangely, they were covered in dirt. I wondered if perhaps they were formed by a process related to that which created my freezer icicles, maybe starting out with ice forming on the blades of grass, but wicking moisture up from the ground (they were all in low-lying areas that were wet or damp a few weeks ago when it was warmer) and extending the ice crystal formation beyond the end of the blade. The dirt maybe got drawn up with the water molecules?

Carrying on with the theme of I’m-not-really-sure, I think this is Winterberry Holly, Ilex verticillata. My mom had commented to me that there were a couple of bushes with flaming-red berries in a wetland up the road, which she’d noticed on a recent trip to town, and she pointed them out to me as we drove by the last time I was up. I did a search for Ontario shrubs bearing orange berries in the winter, and came up with Winterberry, but I would feel more comfortable calling this that in the summer, when I’ve seen its leaves. Even though I’m not sure there’s any other shrub that grows in our area which retains bright orange berries into the winter. Unless there’s something conclusively distinctive about a plant I tend not to make definitive IDs in the winter, and even then I usually have some summer experience with the species, too. To prove this point, Jennifer over at A Passion for Nature recently included a photo of snow-covered Winterberry in one of her posts, but her bush doesn’t look much like mine, so I’m inclined to just leave it as a tentative ID.

We discovered this giant bracket fungus growing from the top of a stump alongside the trail. I had my sister put her boot up on the stump to provide a sense of scale, as my first photo didn’t look very impressive. Since I don’t have my fungus guide here with me, I don’t know the identity of this individual, although it somewhat resembles an oversized and independent Turkey Tail. I will try to remember to update this with the actual ID when I get home and return to my field guide. There’s lots of different types of fungus in the forest here, some common ones I recognize, but lots I didn’t, and so I admired them but for the most part didn’t bother with photos. Fungus is one of those groups that I mostly don’t even try to ID strictly using the internet, preferring to look it up in a printed guide where you can quickly flip through photos.

We returned to the house by way of the horses’ field, so that my sister could check their water trough level before we headed out for the afternoon. This was Raven’s first experience with horses (although she’d met the cows down the road from our house a few times, I think). I don’t think she knew what to make of them, or even whether to be afraid or curious or playful. The donkey made it clear that he wasn’t interested in playing, however (donkeys are often kept in herds of other animals like sheep because they are exceptionally bold and instinctively will drive off wolves or coyotes), and so we retreated back to the house to thaw out.

Fungi at my feet

One of the things about hiking through the forest is you tend to spend a disproportionate amount of time looking at the ground. Walking along a well-groomed trail, through a meadow, or down the road, you’re able to keep your eyes up and take in your surroundings, or watch the birds or butterflies or other organisms that are generally found above the ground. In the forest, though, your eyes are busy scanning the ground for rocks, roots or logs that you’re liable to trip on.

Unsurprisingly, one’s observations tend to have a natural bias to organisms and features close to the ground. Since such a large proportion of them grow from the ground or fallen vegetation, fungus figure prominently in such observations. I saw quite a number of neat fungi while we were out yesterday, or at least what I thought was a large number given the time of year. There are some types of fungi that are found year round, mostly bracket fungi, and those ones I’d expect to encounter, but there were many fleshy ones that surprised me, as well. The guides never mention the time of year these things are found, or how late into the fall they’ll persist, and I’d just sort of figured they’d all have faded by now.

(Of course, after saying that, the photo I put as the header image happens to be an above-ground fungus. I think it’s a bracket fungus called Cerrena unicolor, which I talked a bit about last winter. It’s got a really neat life-history that involves a horntail wasp and an ichneumonid wasp as well.)

I believe this one is a type of jelly fungi called Black Witch’s Butter, Exidia glandulosa. It’s a fairly common species, usually found on the dead twigs and branches of hardwoods. I’m used to seeing fungi mostly on logs or snags, so almost missed this one, growing on the end of a broken branch half-hidden among the leaves. Jelly fungi are a neat group that don’t have the typical fungi shape, instead forming gelatinous masses that shrivel and grow according to the available moisture. We’ve had a stretch of wet weather, so these ones were filled out.

These are a common and widespread species with the delightful name of Lemon Drops, Bisporella citrina. It’s in the superficially similar but unrelated group Sac Fungi. Unlike the jelly fungi, which are basically just blobs, sac fungi do actually have stems, but in the case of this species they’re short and well-hidden. It’s found on dead logs where the outer bark has been shed (which has the fancy name of decorticated, I learned), and often occurs in huge numbers, up to hundreds of individual fruitbodies in a cluster. This group was relatively small by comparison.

This was a cool one. At first I thought it was another jelly fungi, or some other sort of fungi. It took a bit of searching around on the internet, since I didn’t locate it in my mushroom guide, but I eventually found it while searching images of Copper Penny. It turned out not to be a fungus at all, but rather a lichen (I suppose technically a lichen is a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an algae, so it is still part fungus, but not wholly so). I believe it is Peltigera hymenina. I couldn’t see a common name for it, but a related species, P. canina, is called Dog Lichen, or sometimes Dog-tooth Lichen, for the resemblance of the spore-producing projections to dogs’ teeth. The species belong to a group sometimes called the Felt Lichen, for their flat, soft appearance.

This is another type of lichen, and one that kept catching my eye throughout the hike, once I’d stopped and peered close enough to notice it. It’s a Pixie Cup lichen, a member of the genus Cladonia, although I’m not sure exactly which species. I tend to think of lichens as mostly those flat leafy formations seen underneath the cups in the photo, so I wasn’t sure whether the cups and “clubs” were part of the same lichen, a different species, or even perhaps a fungus. Turns out there’s a whole variety of lichens, not just the leafy sort, in all sorts of shapes, from flat, to cup, to coral-like. This one was just small, perhaps a centimeter tall at most, less than half an inch.

Speaking of looking closely at things, part of the reason I was paying closer attention to surfaces was because of a recent post by Wandering Weeta, and specifically one photo where she shows some fungal growths on the stem of a fallen leaf. It amazed me that she even noticed those, and it made me pause to wonder what I may be missing.

Fungal growths

So, the long-awaited post on fungi. As I mentioned a few days ago, while out hiking the woods on our numerous excursions to the park I encountered quite a number of interesting fungus species. I dutifully took photos of everything, making sure I got a nice clear photo (as best as I could, anyway, given the low light conditions), checked the underside when I remembered to, and then came home to try to identify them.

It didn’t take me long to realize just how unhelpful a photo can be for many mushroom species. There are several that are very distinct and easy to recognize, of course, such as the above. The bright colour of the cap, covered in white spots, makes it an Amanita sp., but how to tell Amanita muscaria from Amanita flavoconia? I think this is the former, also known as Fly Agaric, which is supposed to be very common. There are different colour varieties, yellow, orange-red and bright red, with the latter being absent around the Great Lakes, but common in the west. A few species of Amanita are edible, but this brightly coloured one is poisonous. They contain amatoxins, a group that can destroy liver and kidney function in even the tiniest quantities, resulting in a relatively quick and painful death.

If I’m correct in my ID, this is another poisonous mushroom, Scleroderma sp., probably S. areolatum. This large, globular puffball was found growing on a ravine slope. The puffballs, at least the mushrooms I think of as puffballs, are spherical masses, lacking a stem and growing right on the ground. Growing up, there were Giant Puffballs in the woods behind my parents’ house, but I haven’t seen them for years. I thought they were the coolest things. I’m not sure if they get their name because they’re all puffed up and swollen, or because when you poke them (or they’re hit by falling raindrops, twigs, or other items) they release a big puff of spores, but either way, they’re unusual.

There are actually edible puffballs, and this is one of them (as is the Giant Puffball). Although much tinier than the previous species, no more than an inch or two, they function in much the same manner to release their spores, except that there is a pore at the top that the spores are released through. This species is Pear-shaped Puffball, Lycoperdon pyriforme. According to the Lone Pine field guide, this is the most common puffball species in the northeast, though this is the first time I’ve encountered it. It characteristically fruits in dense clusters on rotting wood; the ones I found were at the base of a tree, so I wonder what that says about the tree. The guide notes, “Edible, but lacks flavour.”

I believe these are White Pine Boletes, Suillus americanus. The boletes are a group halfway between the stalked, gilled mushrooms and the pored bracket fungi – they have a stalk and cap but have pores like bracket fungi. As the name suggests, this species is usually found fruiting in the soil under White Pines. There were certainly a few of them in the area, though I can’t recall now if I specifically found this one at the foot of a White Pine or not. It’s listed as edible.

My best guess on this one is that it’s Russula paludosa. This is where I realized how much easier it would be to identify these mushrooms in the field, with the book in hand, or otherwise by bringing a sample back. First, I’m not completely certain about the underside, though I think it’s gilled. Second, the genus Russula has the characteristic of brittle gills, instead of the spongey texture I tend to associate with mushrooms. It’s hard to run your finger along the gills in a photo to see if they break, though. I suppose part of my problem is that I don’t like the idea of breaking or picking something unnecessarily, so if I can check the underside without doing so I will, and if I can’t then I don’t tend to check. The cap on this one has been munched on by something, which didn’t help with trying to narrow down an ID, either. This species is supposed to be widespread and common, though, usually in moist soil under conifers, which would fit the bill.

Two species in this photo, both tricky to identify without the specimens in hand, but I think they’re Funnel Clitocybe, Clitocybe gibba, and Vermilion Waxcap, Hygrocybe miniata. A lot of narrowing down the potential species for a mushroom depends on the colour of the spores, which is generally determined by taking the mushroom cap, sitting it on a piece of white paper for a few hours to allow some of the spores to be released and fall onto the paper, and then looking at the “spore print” that’s left when you pick the cap up again. Since I don’t have that luxury, I do the best I can with visual IDs and comparing habitat info. I’m fairly certain about the waxcap, but the clitocybe (or whatever it is) could easily be misidentified. Both species are listed as fairly common, so I figure my chances are good…

This one, Marasmius capillaris, was a slightly easier identification because of the daintiness of the mushrooms. There are really only two groups that produce such tiny caps on thin, delicate stems: Marasmius sp. and Mycena sp. (the latter of which I mentioned back in the winter). The ID for this species was aided by the fact that there was a photo in the Lone Pine book that almost exactly resembled my photo, right down to the leaf litter the mushrooms were growing out of. Also widspread and relatively common, it apparently comes up quickly in periods of extended rain, but will shrivel quickly so is often missed.

And finally, what I thought would be the easiest ID but turned out not to be. This is obviously a tooth fungus of some sort, much like the Shelving Tooth of this post, but growing in a clump instead of as a stalked mushroom or bracket. Easy, right? There’s only a few such species listed in the book. However, none of them seemed to match quite right. I’m thinking it’s maybe not shown, but could be a member of the genus Hericium. These fruit in clumps on the sides of logs or snags, and both the ones listed in the guide are indicated to be widespread and fairly common. Also edible, though I’m not sure how you’d fry this one up.

Edit: Jennifer (see below) just wrote about Hericium; based on her post I think this might be H. erinaceus.

For more neat fungi check out the stuff Jennifer of A Passion for Nature found on a walk back in August. Perhaps I just wasn’t paying close enough attention, but I sure haven’t seen anything that colourful around here!