fungus

Earth tongues

I’d just like to start by saying – the moth book is done! Done! I took it to the post office and mailed it off today, with much excitement (the clerk, whom I asked to take a photo as I pretended to put it in the mail slot, didn’t quite appreciate my excitement, I don’t think). Of course, the book’s not completely done. There’re many more steps yet to go even once the initial manuscript is prepared and finished – a fact that I didn’t truly appreciate until I was doing a book of my own. Once our editor gets the files I sent her, she still has to edit all our text, we need to make any revisions as required, then the contents go on to layout, come back to us for proofing (the trademark Peterson arrows get put in at this stage), and go back for final revisions, before ever a copy gets printed. Actually being involved in the production of a book has been rather enlightening, not least of all in the amount of time it takes to get a book from idea to store shelf. It’ll have been about four years, in our case.

So life finally returns to normal for me. For the last, oh, three months or so, I’ve been buckled down and focused on completing the moth manuscript. A lot of things have fallen by the wayside, and I’m looking forward to getting back to all those things I’ve been missing. Like the blog! I’ve had these photos since last week, fully intending to post them shortly after taking them (I’d also been expecting to wrap up the book before the Thanksgiving weekend).

Over dinner one evening last week, Dan asked if I’d noticed the interesting mushrooms growing down near our little bog/fen. I’d been down that way a couple of times in the preceding days, but hadn’t gone in too far, and hadn’t noticed any odd fungi in the part that I had traversed. He commented that they were just the other side, a whole patch of them, thin little dark things sticking up from the moss. I said I’d check them out the next time I went out. In the meantime, I brought down my field guide to fungi for him to look through and see if he recognized them.

He picked them out fairly quickly, and after going back to have a look myself I easily agreed. These are earth tongues, probably Common Earth Tongue, Geoglossum difforme, a common and widespread species. By his description I had expected them to be coral fungi, but they’re actually a type of sac fungus. It’s the same group of mushrooms that contains the highly prized truffles and morels, though the guide suggests that the majority of members are not so edible. Most fungi produce their spores individually and release them through pores or from gills; sac fungi produce their spores grouped within sacs, each sac containing several spores (the number varies by species, but the average is eight). You can see some neat images of Common Earth Tongue spore sacs under the microscope at this page here (it’s from the website of the author of the field guide I use, George Barron)

The method of dispersal also depends on the species, but earth tongues share the same general mechanism as morels. The type of fruitbody is called an apothecium, and the sacs of spores are layered on its outside surface. Immature spores are pigmentless, but mature spores develop pigment to protect them from UV while they are airborne. When the spores are mature, the sac bursts, projecting them into the air for the wind to catch and disperse. Apparently with some species, if you blow gently on the mushroom when the spores are ripe you can trigger the sacs into bursting, releasing puffs of “dust”. I didn’t try it on these ones, in part because I didn’t know to, but even if I had they were damp and tacky and probably wouldn’t have been releasing any dust anyway.

They were all growing in a small patch of sphagnum moss, a short distance from the edge of the bog/fen. From the way they were distributed it looked as though they had an association with the moss, but I suspect it more likely that the moss simply kept the ground there nicely damp compared to the surrounding dirt; there’s no mention of moss in the guide.

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.

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!

Fuzzy fungus

I discovered this neat little fungus growing on some beaver-downed logs at the research station earlier this week. It was unusual in that it was fuzzy, and it caught my eye because of the attractive lobing of the growths into neat leafy shapes. I went back once the sun was high enough to peek over the trees and took a few photos.

Unfortunately, the field guide I had used to identify the fungi back in January had been a library book, so I didn’t have it on hand. And trying to find the identity of something is much aided by a field guide like that. There aren’t any good, complete references online (or at least, if there is one I didn’t stumble across it in my searching). However, I finally discovered something that closely resembled my fungi while browsing search results from ForestryImages.org.

Sure enough, further investigation reveals it to be Schizophyllum commune, or the split gill fungus. The genus name literally means “split leaf”. And naturally, the key identifying feature of this fungus, the split gills, I had no photo of. I had peeked under the cap to check out whether it was gilled or pored, determined that it was gilled, and left it at that. Who knew it was that important?

I actually do have an image of the split gills, above. This is a crop-down from one of the larger photos, which just happened to have one individual curling up enough to expose its underside to the camera, which was nearly overhead. It actually looks more like paired gills, rather than split, with the ridges radiating in twos out from the centre. Schizophyllum is the only genus with this characteristic, and is in fact so unique it has its own family, Schizophyllaceae.

There’s a handful of species in this genus, but Schizophyllum commune is by far the most common. It’s found across North America, and in fact occurs on every continent except Antarctica, where there’s no wood for it to grow on. It superficially resembles the commonly-found bracket fungi that grow on trunks and logs, but has these “gills” instead of pores. The gills aren’t actually spore producing the way they are in true gilled mushrooms, but are instead simply folds of tissue.

Similar to the Mycena corticola I posted about in January, these fungi are marcescent: they can dry out over the winter months or during periods of low moisture, and then come back to life at the next rains. This adaptation is part of what makes this fungus so successful around the world. Rather than growing new fruiting bodies each year, the fungus’ “roots” (the mycelium) only have to produce one growth which will last throughout the year, even during dry spells.

Fungus reproduction is a complex thing, where compatibility of external mating structures is less important than compatibility of genomes. In order to reduce the likelihood of inbreeding, a fungus can only “mate” with other fungi that have a different DNA sequence (allele) at a gene location (locus) from their own. To compare to humans, it’s like blue-eyed people only being able to mate with brown-, green-, or hazel-eyed people, but not other blue-eyed people. In fungi, there’s usually two loci used in mating compatibility, and each locus has multiple alleles. In the case of Schizophyllum commune, there’s more than 300 alleles at the first locus, and over 90 at the second – resulting in more than 28,000 allele combinations. So instead of the two sexes found in vertebrates (male and female), there’s 28,000 sexes in this species of fungus! This enormous number means any given individual will be compatible with over 99% of the rest of the population (vertebrates are only compatible with 50%).

One other wild thing about this fungus – it doesn’t just stick to rotten logs. There have been a number of reports (though very rare) of the spores of this fungus (presumably inhaled) infecting the respiratory tract of humans. For instance, this poor woman had the fungus actually growing in her sinus cavity! Of course, it probably didn’t have these lovely fan shapes inside her nose, and it was identified using DNA sequencing. In another, the fungus had grown through the soft palate of a child and was forming fruiting bodies in her sinus. I can’t find the actual paper on that one to determine whether they were actual mushroom-shapes, though all the sites that mention it sure make it sound that way (this site is where I read it first). Others document lung, airway, and even brain infections.

So be careful not to inhale too deeply when you bend over to check this neat little fungus out…

The Black Knot

Edit: This post was recently included in the March edition of the Festival of Trees, a blog carnival focusing on, you guessed it, trees. You can check out the full edition at Orchards Forever.

There is a bush in the backyard, behind the house, growing beside a large stump. The stump is what remains of a mature pine that came down before I was around, struck by lightning. The shrub and stump were a play-spot for my sisters and I when we were young, and I remember picking blackcaps from the canes that grew under its branches.

In recent winters I’ve noticed a few black, crusty growths forming on some of the small branches. It’s a familiar phenomenon, but one I hadn’t investigated before. When I was much younger we had a plum and a cherry tree on the property, and I recall plucking ripe plums from the branches of the one, and my parents complaining (good-naturedly) about the birds eating the fruit from the other. Both gradually succumbed to a crusty black fungus, and while the cherry struggles on, the plum long ago died and came down (although I did notice a hopeful new sapling right beside where it used to be).

So to see these growths forming on another tree I knew as a kid, I thought I’d investigate. Turns out, it’s fairly common. It’s a fungus, Apiosporina morbosum, known by the common name “the Black Knot” (which sounds rather dramatic). It almost exclusively infects trees of the genus Prunus, which includes cultivated species such as plum or cherry, or wild native species such as chokecherry or black cherry. The little shrub in the backyard is a chokecherry.

This little tree, although I didn’t try to identify it, is probably a black cherry, the most common Prunus species in these woods. It has a substantially more progressed infection. The fungal spores infect the young buds of the tree when it’s just leafing out in the spring, and it takes a few months for the infection to appear. Initially just look like thick brown galls. Eventually, the following spring or summer, the bark splits and the gall turns into these charcoal-black, crusty growths.

The fungal growths are most often seen on smaller branches, but like in the above photo, can sometimes spread to the trunk of the tree. Although an infection on a branch can compromise the branch’s growth and create disfiguring contortions (such as the first photo), it only kills the branch if the growth completely encircles it (called “girdling”). Any portion of the branch above the fungus will die. If the fungus girdles the trunk of the tree, the whole tree will die. The fungus will continue to spread over many years, and eventually will either compromise the tree so severely it will die, or girdles the trunk causing death.

The fungal spores are released by splashing rain and carried by the wind, and mild spells during the spring rains trigger their production and release. Once a tree’s infected, an individual growth will only live a couple years (after which it dies and turns whiteish-pink, colonized by another species of fungus), but during that time it has the ability to spread to other areas of the tree.

The good news is, you can do something about it if one of the trees in your yard becomes infected. It’s simply a matter of removing the infected bit, cutting back to 10 or 20 cm below the infected bit (since the fungus travels under the bark and may be present outside of the growth). This is best done in the winter while the tree and fungus are both dormant, and the fungus should be burned or otherwise disposed of so it doesn’t infect other trees.

So there’s some hope for the little shrub, and perhaps if I prune it this winter I can keep it from spreading to the mature chokecherry that shades the kitchen window. Now just to dig the gardening shears out from where they’ve been packed away for the winter…