mushrooms

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.

So back to those itty-bitty mushrooms. The tree was actually the first one my mom and I had stopped to examine the lichen on, and it was fairly unremarkable for the most part. There were little patches of blue-gray foliose lichen up and down the trunk in the first five or six feet from the ground, but nothing that really stood out and grabbed my eye. If this had been the second tree we looked at, after examining the Sugar Maple for instance, I may not have given it more than a cursory glance. It was just by chance that the photographs I took of the lichen on this tree happened to be near a deep crevice in the bark. And at the back of this crevice, with small numbers climbing out and onto the surrounding bark, were these teensy-tiny mushrooms. To give you a better idea of scale, let me post a picture with a reference piece:

That’s a normal HB pencil. Identifying these little guys was a bit of a challenge. The Lone Pine field guide to Mushrooms of Ontario and Eastern Canada is an excellent reference in terms of providing good colour photos and info on the different species, but it contains 609 species of mushroom and fungus, and these are only just a selection of the most common species likely to be encountered. I couldn’t find a species in the book small enough to be this one, but I narrowed it down to a couple of likely genera, and then did a Google search. I’m reasonably certain the species is Mycena corticola, also called “Bark Mycena” because it grows exclusively on bark, usually freshly fallen or declining living trees. Unlike many mushrooms that grow on live trees, this one doesn’t damage its host, as it doesn’t reach deep enough into the tree to affect the tree’s food transportation system. It’s often found in association with lichen or moss, such as it is here. It is “marcescent”, meaning it has the ability to dry up when moisture is low, and come “back to life” after precipitation or fog. I took the second photo, with the pencil, today and the first photo yesterday, and you can even detect between the two a bit of drying – the mushrooms in the second photo are browner and look a little shrivelled in comparison; I had some difficulty finding a good patch to take the photo of. This may also be in part due to age – they probably came out during the warm spell last week, and the purpleish colour eventually fades to brown as they age.

Mushrooms are hard to find at this time of year since most of them don’t grow under layers of snow. Fungus, however, is easier to come by. Undoubtedly the easiest to locate in the winter are those large fungal growths that you usually find secured to the side of a rotting stump or log. They’re called “bracket fungus”, or sometimes “polypores” because they have many (“poly”) tiny pores on the underside of the growth to release reproductive spores, instead of the “gills” we associate with mushrooms (what you see when you flip a mushroom over and look at the underside of its cap). I believe the above photo is of Fomes fomentarius, a common and widespread bracket fungus. Its common name is “Tinder Polypore”, after its historical use as tinder for starting fires. If hammered flat it’ll smolder for a long time without much heat, and before matches were invented was often used to transport fire (for instance in nomad societies; in fact, “The Iceman” had a piece of it, along with some flint, in a pouch he was carrying). It was also used as a primitive medical tool and has been shown to contain certain substances, such as iodine, that prevent bacterial growth. It grows commonly on birches, and indeed all the ones I found in the woods were on birch.

This is another type of bracket fungus, I suspect Cerrena unicolor. One of the frequently mentioned identification features is that C. unicolor is whiteish or brownish in colour but is frequently greenish due to a layer of algae growing on top, which is clearly the case here. This species has an amazing relationship with a couple of wasps, the horntail wasp (genus Tremex) and ichneumonid wasp (genus Megarhyssa). The horntail wasp female carries around spores of C. unicolor in her ovipositor, and when she lays her eggs in the bark of a tree, the spores are deposited with it. The spores begin growing into the bracket fungi in the photo, and in doing so create a large network of fungal “roots” (called “mycelium”), which the horntail larvae feed on during their development. When the larvae pupate, they absorb some of the spores into the pupa, which are then incorporated into the female wasp’s ovipositor during development to allow the cycle to continue. Now, I don’t exactly understand why the fungus does this next part, but perhaps it’s to keep the larvae from eating it out of house and home (the mycelium are its connection to its food source, after all). The fungus will produce a pheromone that attracts ichneumonid wasp females, who come and lay their own eggs. When the eggs hatch, the larvae parasitize the horntail larvae. Whoda thunk all that was quietly going on under those fungal growths?

Edit: It’s been suggested to me that this is actually a gypsy moth egg mass, and after looking it up, I think that’s correct. This is one pitfall of identifying something yourself, particularly in an area that’s new to you (like fungi). The description in the fungus field guide was a pretty good match, and the image, although small and difficult to discern details, sure looked like it. Perhaps this is the moths’ camoflauge technique? :) In any case, I’ll leave the text as is, for the information on slime moulds (which should be correct regardless of the identity of the above).

Here’s one last fungus to close off this post. I just happened to spot this blob of creamy brown on the trunk of a tree as I was leaving the forest yesterday. At first glance it looks like someone thwacked the bark with a wet fluffy cattail head, or it might be something a cat threw up (though getting it five feet up a tree would be a feat even for an ambitious cat). It actually belongs to a group of fungi called “slime moulds”, which are fungi that lack the defined shapes we tend to associate with the group. Similar to the fungi that grows on the forgotten leftovers in the back of the fridge, it’s often (though not always) a large blob of roughly uniformly-coloured stuff (for lack of a better word).I’m not sure of the particular species of the above specimen, but there are only some 500-odd species in the world, most of which are very widespread, indicating that, evolutionary speaking, they’re all very old. They have two life stages. The above is the “fruiting” stage, where they produce spores to carry on the next generation. Their first life stage is as a “plasmodium”, a slime (from which they take their name) that is not often seen as it usually resides in rotting logs or other decaying matter. When it comes time to spread their seed, however, they need to move to a better location where the spores can be caught by the wind or otherwise dispersed. The crazy thing is – they move like amoebas, crawling across surfaces to find a good fruiting location, ingesting organic particles in their path and ejecting ones they can’t eat. All at a rate that would make a snail look like a cheetah, however! As a result, they don’t move far, usually just a couple metres at most. And I’ll leave you with this food for thought: slime mould has recently been shown to be able to navigate a maze, connecting two points through the shortest possible distance to food – perhaps an example of primitive intelligence in a fungus?

Tag: mushrooms

A selection of summer fungi

Fungi of the winter woods